"Guy in Real Life," by Steve Brezenoff

Okay, so I'm going to start this review with two warnings:

Warning the First: I had no interest in reading this book, no desire to pick it up at all, and the only reason I did was because it's FYA Book Club's April pick. So I may have gone into it with a bit of resentment at being "forced" to read it.

Warning the Second: I ended up skimming this novel sometime after the halfway mark.

But guys, this book sucked.

It starts out with an interesting idea - after black-clad metalhead Lesh gets grounded by his parents for coming home drunk from a concert, he gets suckered into signing up for a World of Warcraft-style MMO by his nerd friend, Greg.

Lesh initially signs up as a meathead orc warrior at Greg's behest, but is soon bored - until he decides to create a female elf healer because the avatar reminds him of a new girl at school that he can't get off his mind. Of course, it's not long before Lesh realizes that other players treat him differently when they think he's a girl. But for some reason, he really enjoys embodying a female character on a vast fantasy adventure.

Meanwhile, the girl he's crushing on, Svetlana, is an anti-social artist who's heavily invested in tabletop, Dungeons and Dragons gaming. She starts hanging out with him when she realizes he can help her shake an infuriatingly persistent (and unwanted) suitor, but starts realizing there's more to him than meets the eye.

Doesn't this sound good? Nope. I decided to make a list of the things that annoyed me - and it's a long one.

1. This book isn't finished. It throws out a bunch of ideas like so much spaghetti at a refrigerator, but it doesn't stick around to clean any of it up or explore it in any depth. Lesh's adventures as a female character, Svetlana's attempts to keep her D and D club at school from being disbanded, Lesh's fracturing relationship with his truly hateful "friend" Greg, and Svetlana's increasing disgust and frustration with unwanted male attention - none of it gets resolved in a meaningful way. Maybe the real ending will come out in a future DLC?

2. Svetlana is primarily treated as Obsession!Bait. Almost every major male character in the novel is obsessed with her. There's family friend Fry, who becomes increasingly violent and bullying towards her (and her friends!) when she refuses his advances. There's Abraham, who quits the D and D club because ... she dates someone else, thereby refusing his advances. There's a Creepy Online Stalker who targets her and sends her weird gifts because he confuses her for the character Lesh plays online (for reals). Her storyline is focused almost entirely on how all these dudes are obsessed with her and make decisions of varying levels of inappropriateness because she turns them down.

And...am I forgetting someone? Oh right - LESH, who's SO obsessed with her from the very first minute that he creates a lookalike avatar of her so he can pretend to be close to her. HOW IS THAT OKAY? The novel never explains this theme - if all these men are irrationally fixated on this one girl, what makes Lesh the "good" one? His plot line is like the G-rated online version of that Buffalo Bill dude from Silence of the Lambs.

Long story short - the most important female character is reduced to a damsel who's constantly beating off hordes of angry thwarted males with her 12-sided die.

3. The actual gamer characters in this book are almost uniformly awful, cliched, shallow, bigoted turds - and the book never explores or deals with it. Yes, some of them need to be turds. This novel's main (if poorly-handled) theme is on sexism in gaming. It's about a tough-looking rocker dude who enjoys playing as a delicate lady elf, but discovers that playing a female character inspires other gamers to behave like total asshats.

Except - Lesh never explores deeper than, "Man, that sucks." Take his "friendship" with Greg - a venomous douchenerd who spits homophobic slurs like a malfunctioning sprinkler. I would have liked to see Lesh actually internalize what Greg says and realize that it's not okay. I would have liked to see him tell Greg off, stand up for himself and reveal Greg for the bully he is. Except - it never happens. Greg throws a mild hissy fit when he finds out Lesh is a G.I.R.L. (Guy In Real Life - get it?) and then vanishes from the novel completely. No resolution. No exploration of theme.

And the depictions of almost all the gamers (with a few exceptions with Svetlana's D and D crew) are laughably stereotyped. They're nerds who are good at math who hunch over their screens with bad posture and bad skin, their hands poised like claws above their keyboards. The only thing missing is a pair of taped-up, thick-rimmed Coke bottle glasses to settle the depiction of gamers firmly back in the 1980s.

4. The description of the MMO itself makes no sense. First of all, the author inserts truly laughable attempts at epic fantasy to describe the world of the game. Brezenoff is no Tolkien. He's not even a Tracy Hickman. Moreover, there are a number of "questionable" events that happen in the game - for instance, poor Lesh gets molested and drenched in beer by a pack of dwarves and needs to be rescued. Um, I'm sorry - are there fantasy games out there where avatars are allowed to rape or sexually assault other player characters? Who would design a game like that?

I get the sense Brezenoff is attempting to highlight the sexism that female players often endure in gaming - but instead of focusing on the very real, very common ways girls are ostracized in games, he decides to make up some exaggerated, cartoonish bullshit that would NEVER HAPPEN in a popular MMO because no game dev in his right mind would put a rape feature in his game unless he wanted to endure a billion lawsuits.

5. Our two main protagonists barely spend any time together.
Seriously, even if the rest of the book had been fine, Guy in Real Life would still have fallen flat because its two romantic protagonists barely talk to each other. Sure, Lesh obsesses over Svetlana all the time, but Svetlana has her own life, and their scenes apart are far more numerous, important, and interesting than their scenes together. I still don't understand what they have in common or how their romance works - and ultimately the whole stalker storyline muddies the waters even further.

My opinion? Avoid this sloppily-plotted, creepy, and ultimately pointless novel in favour of novels that aim for a higher level (ha!) of story telling and theme structure.

C-

"True Pretenses," by Rose Lerner

The Chick: Lady Lydia Reeve. A genteel lady whose family has traditionally held a high political interest in the town of Lively St. Lemeston.
The Rub: Now that her father's dead, her skittish younger brother  is content to let that interest lapse in order to pursue his own desires. And Lydia has no money of her own to maintain her family's influence.
Dream Casting: Isla Fischer.

The Dude: Asher Cohen, a.k.a. "Ashton Cahill." A Jewish con artist on the run with his brother and partner in crime, Rafe.
The Rub: Rafe is tired of their life and wants to go straight, so Ash needs to concoct a truly lucrative swindle to give Rafe safer life options than the army.
Dream Casting: Mark Ruffalo.

Romance Convention Checklist:

• 1 Inconvenient Inheritance
• 1 Inconveniently Dead Parent
• 1 Stolen Baby
• 1 Plot-Propelling Urchin
• Several Fake Names

The Word: You know what time it is? TIME FOR ANOTHER ROSE LERNER NOVEL! To set next to In For a Penny, Lily Among Thorns, and Sweet Disorder, we have True Pretenses.

Our novel opens on two brothers, Ash and Rafe, in the midst of escaping after a successful swindle. Orphaned, impoverished, and Jewish, they've eked out their outcast existence through theft, trickery and clever con artistry. However, Rafe (the younger brother) has tired of the game and wants to go straight. His protective older brother, Ash, reluctantly agrees, with one caveat: they must perform one more swindle, to set Rafe up properly for his new life of law abidance. 

Ash travels on ahead to the town of Lively St. Lemeston (the same setting from Sweet Disorder) and discovers low-hanging fruit ripe for the plucking: Lady Lydia Reeve. Her highly political father, Lord Wheatcroft, held a heavy interest in Lively St. Lemeston before his sudden death, but his son Jamie now balks at the idea of continuing the tradition. Lydia's determined to hold onto their family's interest until her brother comes to his senses, but the only funds at her disposal come from a trust that will only be released upon her marriage. 

I'll be honest - the set-up to this novel doesn't make a whole lot of sense. It's kind of confusing - at first, the brothers plan to offer Lydia access to her trust through a sham marriage to Rafe (in exchange for 3000 pounds) but then Ash wants Rafe and Lydia to marry for realsies because they're so cute together and it'll keep Rafe out of the army. What?

Um, WHAT?

Thankfully, before that ridiculousness can happen, Rafe and Ash get into an argument that ends with their estrangement, leaving Ash to offer himself to Lydia instead. The plot is probably the weakest part of the novel, and the weakest of all Lerner's novels to date. After the initial set-up, the rest of the book is virtually conflict-free until the too-sudden Black Moment at the end. Ash and Lydia get along famously about 99% of the time, with the other 1% devoted to depressing self-examination. 

So why did I keep reading? Despite the fact that there is relatively little drama between Ash and Lydia, their individual characters and habits are fascinating - Lydia's, especially. She is very much a conservative, devoted to maintaining the traditions of the past, suspicious of change, and almost pathologically afraid of showing weakness or negative emotion of any kind. At the beginning of the book, her methods of expression are all but muzzled by her refusal to utter anything that might possibly reflect badly on her father or brother. She has been raised to cater to the needs of others while repressing her own. It becomes a relief to talk to Ash, someone who cannot judge her since his social status is virtually nonexistent.

Ash is a more nebulous character, but perhaps that's intentional. His Jewish identity is important to him (sex with random ladies is a worry because how does one explain the lack of a foreskin?), but otherwise, he's afraid to define himself as anything other than "Rafe's brother." Finding and committing to an identity is a new experience for him. He's a con man without an emotional off-switch. His success at conning developed from his ability to empathize with and draw closer to the rubes he fleeced, leaving him incapable of trusting other people's emotions - and his own, least of all. Does he really enjoy Lydia's company? Or is he just desperate to be liked, because likeable people get what they want? The only emotional stability he's ever preserved is his love for Rafe, and without him, he's adrift.

The enormous status gulf between Lydia and Ash is also entertaining as it allows for a thorough examination of privilege. Ash was no Dickensian urchin - his past involves theft, graverobbing, fencing, and sex work. The contrast between the protagonists is especially potent because their childhoods were superficially similar - both Lydia and Ash were motherless children unfairly thrust into parental roles over their younger siblings. However, the vast difference in their upbringings and environments invites interesting comparisons, most especially in how they've learned to lie to other people.

At the same time, even as Lydia's pampered upbringing is contrasted and compared, her own feelings of dissatisfaction, grief and loneliness are not invalidated just because she's wealthy.

While True Pretenses is not the strongest of Rose Lerner's novels when it comes to plot, it's still a refreshing, pleasantly entertaining read.
B

"White Cat," by Holly Black

The Protagonist: Cassel Sharpe. The only non-magical dud in a family of curse workers, he ought to be able to live a normal life.
The Rub: His family's magic might not run in his blood, but their propensity for mischief does.

Secondary Characters:

Phillip: Cassel's oldest brother. A body worker for the Zacharov crime family.

Barron: Cassel's second oldest brother, a luck worker who dated the only girl Cassel ever loved. How's that for luck?

Sam: Cassel's boarding school roommate and eventual, reluctant partner-in-crime.

Lila: The daughter of the powerful Zacharov crime family, and Cassel's best friend - and murder victim. Cassel's family was forced to hide the evidence to protect them from mob vengeance, but Cassel can't quite get her out of his mind.

YA Trope Checklist:

• Unattainable Female Love Interest
• Screwed Up Parents
• The "Normal" Best Friend
• Private School Angst

The Word: Why have I never read Holly Black before? This is obviously an unconscionable oversight, and shall be corrected immediately.

With a few deft strokes, Black creates a rich, vibrant world that is like our own, but not quite. Everyone wears gloves. People carry enchanted pieces of stone around their necks to protect them. And almost everyone at Cassel Sharpe's boarding school holds him under suspicion due to his unsavoury family connections and mysterious sleepwalking.

In this world, magic (or "working") was outlawed along with alcohol during Prohibition, and like Prohibition, outlawing magic didn't make the workers disappear - it just made them all outlaws. The world is now riddled with massive magical crime families who can make people forget things, lose at craps, or fall in love - for the right price. And God help you if you can't pay it. All it takes to work a curse is skin-to-skin contact - that's why everyone wears gloves in public.

Cassel Sharpe, our hero, goes through life haunted by three facts: 1) he comes from a family of magical criminals and con artists, 2) of that family, he is the only one with no magical talent, and 3) he is a murderer. Three years ago, he killed Lila Zacharov - his best friend, first love, and the daughter of the Zacharov crime boss. Even worse, he has no idea how or why he did it, but his worker brothers rallied around him to cover it up and protect the family from Daddy Zacharov's vengeance.

However, when he starts experiencing powerful, dangerous dreams involving a white cat demanding he remove a curse, Cassel begins to wonder if his understanding of those three basic facts - hell, of his entire reality - is all that it seems. But to do that, he will have to dive into the worker underworld despite having no powers of his own.

The world building in this novel is so fresh and interesting. The idea of magic users forming this immensely powerful criminal underground is fascinating and opens up so many narrative possibilities that the author takes full advantage of. Not only that, but the magic itself is cool - there are dozens of different types of workers, and each one experiences a particular type of "blowback" when they overuse their magic. Memory workers forget things, death workers develop necrosis, emotion workers lose emotional stability, that sort of thing.

The underground aspect adds a sly subtlety to our teenage hero, Cassel. Despite being magic-less, he's still inherited his family's con artistry and he has trouble trusting people without analyzing how they fit into a particular con or plot. He's intriguing but also tragic - because he trusts himself as little as he trusts other people. He murdered his best friend three years ago and he still has no idea why, only that there must be something in him, something hidden, that made him do it. What if it wakes up again?

I don't want to give anything more away, because half the fun of this original, addictive novel is the sense of discovery as Holly Black continually stirs more delight into this potent stew of con men, magic, lies, politics, and family drama. I've never read a full-length Holly Black novel before, but White Cat will not be the last. Not by a long shot.
A+

"Three Princes," by Ramona Wheeler

The Protagonists: Lord Scott Oken and Professor-Prince Mikel Mabruke. Two princes from different nations under the mighty Egyptian Empire, they are also secret agents for the Pharaoh.
The Rub: When reports reach Egypt that the Nation of the Four Corners (the Incans) are working on rocket technology, Mikel and Scott are sent to see how viable this project is.

Fantasy Trope Checklist:

• Alternate Timelines
• Double-Crosses
• Magical Bond Animals
• Obviously Evil Monarchs
• Royal Intrigues

The Word: Three Princes is the most beautifully-written utter waste of time you'll ever read. 

The concept is original and intriguing - the novel's set in an alternate history (circa 1877 or thereabouts) where the Egyptian Empire never ended, but instead grew and thrived to become the dominant world power thanks to the successful marriage of Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. Egypt is now a wide-spanning and mostly benevolent commonwealth, with only a few rebellious areas left (like the Osterreich empire, ruled by Victoria and Albert!) to threaten the world's safety. 

The characters sound diverse and interesting - Lord Scott Oken, a minor prince from the Egyptian province of Scotland, is a spy for the Pharaoh. His mentor, Professor-Prince Mikel Mabruke (from Nubia), has retired from information-mongering - but both are called back into action by the Pharoah's wife. The Incas, it appears, are working on a scientific project to travel to the moon, and Egypt wants someone trustworthy to travel to South America and see a) if it could work or b) if it could be a threat. 

What follows is a dreadfully slow, narratively hollow, but gorgeously-described imaginary travelogue as Mikel and Scott slowly and cheerfully make their meandering way from Memphis to Tawantinsuyu, by way of several decadently-appointed airships. A luxurious attention to detail is lavished upon their expensive accommodations, their entertainments, the profusion of bare-breasted South American women, and the bizarre technology of airships (cyclists and trained albatrosses are involved) - and almost none on the actual plot, conflict or character development. 

Wheeler stretches out a short story's worth of plot to a 350-page novel, and doesn't waste any of the precious, precious filler (like pages of description devoted to guest room furniture lovingly carved to look like naked ladies) on developing any of the characters beyond the most basic, repetitive strokes. Lord Oken likes sex with ladies. Mikel likes making witty comments to mask his inner pain. Secondary characters pop out of nowhere and make jarringly huge and sudden decisions for no reason, and with no context or development to explain the outlandish choices they make. The novel's main antagonist, for example, is present for maybe ten pages (out of 350) and behaves like a Disney villain who's survived a meth lab explosion. There is no rhyme or reason to his behaviour - or to why anyone follows him or takes him seriously. 

Neither does Wheeler sacrifice completely relevant scenes of frolicking dogs, babies and guinea pigs (for reals) to develop her own plot threads. A mention of a Queen Victoria-led conspiracy involving orchids and bizarre religious cults goes nowhere, and the vicious attack on Mikel at the beginning of the novel that can't possibly be coincidence - turns out to be mere coincidence and is never mentioned again. Um, okay.

I kept reading and waiting for the plot to pick up because Wheeler is a genuinely fantastic wordsmith - her worldbuilding and her grasp of setting and culture are astonishing and beautiful. Her evident talent and skill makes the appalling lack of a plot in this novel an even greater frustration. If you're interested in reading about two friends going on an expensive and largely uneventful exotic vacation, this is the book for you. If you actually require story, substance, conflict, or coherent drama of any sort in your fiction - you'd best look elsewhere.

Three Princes is an empty, self-indulgent non-story wrapped up in beautiful writing.
D

December in New York, Day Four: Marc Chagall, Miracles, and Mo'Pain

At 5:00 am on the morning of our final day in NYC, I was woken up by the ringing of my hotel room's phone. I picked it up, blearily thinking the hotel must be on fire, only to have a stranger with an accent start screaming at me, "Who is this? Who's calling? Who's in the room with you?" Um, hello, you called me, terrifying creeper! The fact that he kept asking, "Who's in there with you?" made me terrified I was going to be robbed (since I'd sleepily responded, "No I'm alone.").

I called the front desk, who discovered the call was internal (the call was coming from inside the house!), and I realized it was likely another guest who thought he was calling the room of his travelling companion. That didn't really explain why he didn't just hang up right away when he realized he'd called the wrong room - did he think I was hiding his friend in my closet? Did he think I was some one-night stand who'd picked up his friend's phone?

Tired and shaken, I later joined my mum for breakfast and explored the Bookmarks Lounge at the top of the hotel - it converted into a dimly-lit bar after 4pm but in the mornings it was light, airy and comfortable. We both regretted not exploring it earlier.

Afterward, we went for Sunday mass at St. Patrick's cathedral. That was kind of a wash - the whole cathedral, inside and out, was swathed in scaffolding and tarps for their massive renovation project. It felt like having mass in a parking garage - however, we did have the lovely consolation prize of having the mass performed by a cardinal (Cardinal Dolan, who waved to us after!). I felt strangely tense and weepy through the whole thing - again, I was going through some tough stuff that year and was not on the best terms with God. But at least Mum enjoyed it.

We returned to Madison and Vine - the Library Hotel's companion restaurant - for brunch. I had eggs benedict, and while I devoured the eggs, bacon, and hollandaise sauce, I hadn't recovered the confidence to try the English muffins. I've grown more wary of bread products over the years, which makes absolutely no sense since I've eaten bread my entire life without an allergic reaction. But anxiety doesn't really listen to logic.

After that, we took a taxi to the Jewish Museum - set in the astoundingly pretty Felix M. Warburg House - to see the Chagall exhibit. Mum is a huge fan of Marc Chagall and her enthusiasm swept me up in the artwork as well. We also explored the Art Spiegelman exhibit there - his work is exceptional, but often disturbing.

We finished off the day with a long, long, very long walk from Central Park to the hotel, 50 blocks of walking during which we were accosted by a would-be rapper named Mo' Pain who sold us his demo CD. I was intimidated (and as it turns out, being approached by aspiring rappers in New York is actually a popular tourist scam), but Mum was charmed and gave him $10. He whipped out a sharpie to sign the CD. "Who should I make it out to?"

Mum: "Meg."

Mo'Pain: "How do I spell that?"

Me: "..."

Mo'Pain: "That's a sexy-ass name!" When we admitted we were from Canada, he said he was a huge fan of Drake. Scam or not, it was at least a very memorable experience and Mum now has a CD of questionable music as a very special souvenir. We also passed by (intentionally) bloodied PETA protesters who were screaming at the customers of Bergdorf's before we finally made it back to the hotel.

We had time for a brief, relaxing cup of tea before the town car arrived to take us back to the airport. We'd reached the end of our trip, and the only exciting thing to happen afterward was when I really thought I saw Paul Rudd enter the first class lounge. He had rumpled hair and thick-rimmed glasses - plus he'd just hosted Saturday Night Live so he would have been in NYC at the time. It was one of those blink-and-you'll-miss it miracles that I'm still doubting myself over. Did I see Paul Rudd? Or was it just an extremely lucky man who looked like Paul Rudd and could afford first class?

We'll never know. Even as I write about this trip more than a year after it happened, it still seems fresh in my mind. Maybe I remember it all so well because it was a truly magical Christmas trip, at a truly magical hotel. Or maybe I remember it because I'm only recently back from my second trip to NYC with my mum where we stayed at the Library Hotel - another adventure I'll try and recount to you before the year is up. I promise.

"The Winner's Curse," by Marie Rutkoski

The Protagonist: Kestral Trajan. The daughter of Valorian's most celebrated general, she's under extreme pressure to either marry or enlist in the military. Her life is hard.
The Rub: But not quite as hard as those of the slaves she owns. Awkward.

YA Tropes Checklist:

• Parents Who Just Don't Understand
• 1 Poor Little Rich Girl
• 1 Boy From the Wrong Side of the Tracks Chains
• 1 Airhead Best Friend
• 2 Underappreciated Musical Talents
• 1 Romantically Lacklustre Rival
• 2 Villains Who Want to Bang the Heroine
• Love Made Me Do It

The Word: I underestimated this novel. Blame it on the woozy, swoony prom-dress cover. Poor little blond girl in a ball gown, whatever shall you do? What love triangles shall you muck up? What doorways will you adorably trip through to be caught by the hero? This cover is terrible, no doubt about it. However, The Winner's Curse pulls fewer punches and hides sharper edges of commentary than I would have guessed. 

Kestral is the pampered-but-unsatisifed daughter of a successful Valorian general living in the occupied Herrani capital city. Ten years ago, the warlike Valorians conquered the artistic, sophisticated Herrani and the survivors of that war now work as slaves in the houses they once owned. 

While out walking, Kestral accidentally winds up at the slave auction, where a slave named Smith is being sold. Intrigued by his spirit and misery that seem to mirror her own, she defies her better judgement and purchases him at an exaggeratedly high price. Despite being remarkably snarky, defiant, and disobedient for a slave, Smith (whose real name is Arin) becomes almost like a friend to Kestral, as they each learn more about each others' people. 

However, unbeknownst to Kestral, Arin is an agent for the underground Herrani revolution working to overthrow the brutal Valorian yoke and restore Herrani freedom once and for all. Can these two crazy kids overcome their teeny tiny ideological differences?

I was quite impressed by the way this novel handled slavery. Kestral is depicted as someone who, while uncomfortable when confronted by the realities of slavery, continues to benefit from it. Ideologically she recognizes that slavery probably sucks, but she can't imagine a life without it and often catches herself ignoring or downplaying it in order to make herself feel better. When we live in a world where fruit is picked by underpaid migrant workers and sneakers are made by child labour and iPods are assembled by starving factory workers - are we any different?

When Kestral's freed nanny-slave Enai dies, Arin mocks her grief by demanding if she even knew who Enai's real family, real children were. Kestral doesn't - she was too afraid to even ask. I appreciated that the author never made the heroine a naive saint who was always good to her slaves. People who contribute to an abusive system still possess the capacity for individual good, and the capacity to eventually wake up and overthrow the abusive system. But that capacity doesn't whitewash their flaws. 

I also loved that Kestral wasn't a super-heroic Katniss character who is miraculously adept at scaling walls and killing bad guys. Instead of being a warrior, she's a strategist - an underused role for women in YA. I really appreciated this - she uses her power in more subtle and original ways.

Rutkoski uses a deft hand that highlights points of insight without getting mired in rhetoric, and the story moves swiftly and smoothly, but I could perhaps have preferred a little more depth to the worldbuilding and the history. Instead, the author uses coding (the Valorians are Romans, the Herrani Greeks) to do her worldbuilding for her, and that felt like a cheat.

All in all, a surprisingly solid read.

B

December in New York, Day Three

(Sorry for the lateness, I've been very lazy - I now have a second trip to New York with my mum to write about so I'd better hurry and catch up!)

For our third day in New York City, Mum and I started out bright and early for the Morgan Library and Museum.

For NYC-bound book lovers, the Morgan Library is not to be missed, because, well, it's a fancy mansion filled with zillions of books! Piermont Morgan was a fanatical book collector and his massive library was on full display, along with exhibitions on Edgar Allen Poe (including some of his original notes), Charles Dickens (we spotted the original manuscript copy of A Christmas Carol), clay Sumerian seals (a surprise exhibit that utterly enchanted my mum), and Queen Elizabeth I's letters.

The main library was absolutely breathtaking - three stories of leather-bound books stretching to the exquisitely-painted ceiling in tightly-packed shelves protected by iron grates, interspersed with stained glass windows and an enormous tapestry, and well-lit displays of rare illuminated manuscripts and jewelled Bibles. This museum was all about the power of books and authors and the devotion of those who love them. Is there anything more powerful than reading a sentence that was hand-inked by a monk half a millennium ago?

A true reader's paradise. And that's not even mentioning the gift shop! Once we were finally able to pry ourselves away from all that literary luxury, we dined at the Morgan Library's top-notch cafe - where the ham and cheese sandwiches came on fresh-baked brioche with hot mustard aioli. New York museums don't mess around with the grub.

After the Morgan, we wandered down to Rockefeller Center to see it in daylight. The streets were so massively crowded the police had to set up barriers around the sidewalks just to prevent people from being accidentally pushed out into the street. The area around the Christmas tree and the skating rink resembled a turned-over anthill.

We made a few aborted attempts to shop in the area but were scared off by the savage crowds at Michael Kors and the dead, glassy eyes of parents entering their second hour waiting in line to get into the American Girl store. Instead, we skipped back down to some quieter side streets, where we found a nice, quite Coach whose flock of bored, nattily-dressed attendants were all too eager to wait upon us. Mum bought me a pair of presents there, under the promise that I not open them until Christmas morning.

We returned to the hotel after that, far too exhausted to even contemplate finding an appropriate restaurant for dinner. We stayed in, instead, and snacked on celery, cheese, and Prosecco at the Reading Room before heading off to our second Broadway show: Kinky Boots.

Billy Porter was astounding in the lead role - charismatic, gorgeous, confident in heels with a killer voice to round out the whole package. The other drag queens were equally talented. Mum was convinced some of them were women dressed as drag queens, until she read the playbill and discovered they were all named Trevor and Kevin. It takes major cahones to perform a jumping split in a string bikini in front of a live audience without damaging yours. Less good was the rather milquetoast while male protagonist who got a few too many solos about how unsatisfying his life is. The biggest surprise of the night came when Mum bought me a soundtrack and it turned out to be signed by Cyndi Lauper herself!

After the show, we shared cocktails in the dim Bookmarks Lounge at the top of the Library Hotel. Three days down, one more to go!

Reread Book and Film Review: "A Little Princess," by Frances Hodgson Burnett

For my last reread pick, I went with a book from my childhood - A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett.

While I remember enjoying it at the time, I always loved The Secret Garden more. This was for a number of reasons. First, Garden was pretty much Jane Eyre for kids and I was all over that. Think about it - the moors, the orphaned narrator, the dark angsty lord of the manor, secret damaged relatives locked away somewhere in the house. Also, Garden inspired an obscure Mandy Patinkin musical with an absolutely mesmerizing soundtrack which strengthened my devotion still more.

Finally, even as a young adult I recognized that Garden's Mary had more of a definite character arc than Princess' Sara. Mary starts her book as a pampered brat, then grows to appreciate the environment and the people around her. Sara, meanwhile, is a preternaturally kind, thoughtful, and compassionate child and, well, remains one throughout the book. At the time, I thought she was a little bit dull, even as the story itself was deliciously melodramatic and interesting.

However, reading it again as an adult gave me a little more insight. In case you're not familiar - A Little Princess is the story of Sara Crewe, a little girl adored and cosseted by her rich, silly father who sends her to school in England where she is further adored and cosseted by the headmistress, Miss Minchin. However, when her father abruptly dies after losing his fortune, Miss Minchin shows her true colours and forces the now-penniless Sara to work as a servant alongside Becky, the school's mistreated scullery maid.

If Secret Garden was Jane Eyre for kids, then Little Princess is the Book of Job. The book is not so much about how her character changes, but how her character endures in the face of hardship. Despite an extremely pampered upbringing, Sara isn't spoiled or unkind. She's always thinking of others and using her imagination to solve problems - she still does this when she's forced to live in an attic, with little to eat and under constant derision from almost everyone at the school, but it's just so much more difficult. Some of these scenes, even for me as an adult, were legitimately heartbreaking. In a lot of ways, Sara reminded me of Anne Shirley (of Green Gables) - another youngster who used her brilliant brain to escape a loveless initial upbringing.

As much as I adore narratives about flawed characters redeeming themselves, I think I've underestimated stories of Genuinely Good People who struggle to maintain that goodness despite dire obstacles.

A Little Princess also shines a pretty bright and painful light on privilege. A lot of this comes from Sara's friends Lottie and Ermengarde who attempt to maintain their friendship with Sara after her fall from grace. Most of their interactions end with Sara using her imagination and willpower to pretend her situation is better off than it is in order to make her friends feel more comfortable about her change in circumstances.

As often as I tried to remind myself that these two were upperclass children with no frame of reference for poverty, some of their interactions with Sara were excruciatingly awkward to read. In one scene, Ermengarde sighs that she wishes she was as thin as Sara - her starved orphan attic-dwelling bestie. Yeah, that's awful, but it's kind of the point - FHB points out how even the most well-meaning wealthy person can be utterly oblivious to the suffering of others.

Of course, with all that realness, there's also a fair about of delightful fantasy and melodrama - loving descriptions of expensive doll clothing, diamond mines, bad investments, intuitive Indian manservants, and mischievous monkey sidekicks. Reading it felt like eating my cake and my vegetables at the same time.

Once I finished the novel, there was really nothing else to do but watch the 1995 film adaptation, directed by Alfonso Cuaron (better known for his work on Gravity, Children of Men, and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban).

There are a lot of things this film does right - the sumptuous visuals, the creative cinematography, and the gorgeous music, to name a few. The actress who plays Miss Minchin is flawlessly cast (Eleanor Bron), and you might recognize Sara Crewe's father as Sir Davos from Game of Thrones (Liam Cunningham).

While I was irked at them moving the setting from England to America (and from 1888 to 1914), some of the changes added interesting layers - particularly the casting of scullery maid Becky as African-American. That added an extra visual and contextual oomph to just how Becky was the lowest of the low in the school's social hierarchy.

That being said, all this goodness melts away the moment the actress playing Sara (Liesel Matthews) opens her mouth. Oy. While the visuals and the music for this movie are beyond compare, the acting and dialogue are laughably ham-handed, a stampeding bull of overacting through the exquisite china shop of FHB's original story. The underage acting in this movie is just awful.

The film's biggest deviation from the source material lies in the ending (mild spoilers). In the novel, Sara's father dies of a brain fever after learning he's been ruined. It's his guilt-ridden business partner who tracks Sara down and rescues her from drudgery to atone for fooling around with her father's money. In the movie, Sara's father is still alive - albeit mustard-gassed into amnesia. He conveniently recovers his memories in time to save her from the police (long story).

Unlike many others, I didn't take issue with this change. Both endings are equally, outrageously melodramatic - plus the film avoids the vaguely classist ending of the novel by having the Crewes adopt Becky. In the book, Becky remains a servant - albeit Sara's better paid, better fed servant. Appropriate to the politics of the time in which the novel was written, FHB always maintained a boundary between the torments of Sara (an upperclass girl forced into a servant's position) and Becky (a member of the servant class in her natural sphere who simply has the misfortune of a cruel employer).

The only real beef I have with the film (other than the acting), is the fate of the horrid Miss Minchin. The film takes an outlandishly childish and nonsensical turn with her cosmic punishment, showing us that this educated, well-connected woman of means has been reduced to a chimney sweep's assistant in a matter of a few weeks. A fate which makes absolutely no damn sense. If you really want to see Miss Minchin suffer, read the book, in which her humiliation is far more realistic, far more searingly personal, and thus much more delicious.

A+

Reread Review: "Prince of Midnight," by Laura Kinsale

Thank God this book didn't suck.

I mean it. My last draws from the Kinsale Deck were major duds - Seize the Fire and Midsummer Moon were sloppy messes involving morally-questionable heroes exploiting/babysitting infantalized pouty-lipped heroines. I was starting to wonder if I'd simply grown out of Kinsale's particular style, so it was with a bit of trepidation that I picked my favourite of her books, The Prince of Midnight, for my month of rereads.

Thankfully, no, it didn't suck. My original review is here.

I still loved both protagonists to pieces, but I did wonder at why I loved Leigh so much. She really isn't a very competent heroine, not really. She never becomes a talented rider or swordswoman, she fails in a lot of her endeavours - hell, her original plan to track down the Prince of Midnight to avenge her family is pretty insane. So why did I love her, while I hated Merlin and Olympia for being useless basket cases?

Well, I think the main reason is because this book (and more importantly, the hero) acknowledges the heroine is flawed, instead of passing off her mistakes and weaknesses as cutesy little quirks. Also, despite the fact that she was raised as a gentlewoman and thus has very few practical martial skills, she still managed to tramp her way all over France and back again, risk every danger, put her back to all sorts to work, over and over again to achieve her goal. Regardless of how often she fails. That's kind of awesome.

Also, her role in the story isn't to be the swashbuckler. S.T. Maitland is the swashbuckler. S.T.'s glory hasn't dimmed one watt in the years since I last read this novel, although my understanding of his nuance and his complicated relationship with Leigh has grown. At the end of the novel, Leigh calls herself S.T.'s anchor, and it just fits so perfectly. S.T. is passionate and romantic and desperate - and a bit of a flibbertigibbet. He needs to be daring and dashing because he can't imagine anyone loving him if he's not. Leigh is practical and focused, so she can keep him grounded - just as he frees her from her crushing grief with his free-spirited flirtations.

The Prince of Midnight is a rich, madcap novel that gives us a grounded, layered romance in the midst of a rollicking, insane, coincidence-laden plot. I highly recommend.
A+

Video Game Review: "Dragon Age II"

Well lookee here! Another videogame review! Don't worry - I'll go back to reviewing books relatively soon (including Ashes to Ashes and my reread of Prince of Midnight).

So remember when I fangirled all over Dragon Age: Origins? Well, there's a sequel!

And it's ... different. Still good! But very different, and different in a way that made some fans of the previous game pretty angry. However, I still really enjoyed it.

The game's narrative is built around a storytelling framework: the cataclysmic events of the game have already happened, and one of your party members, a roguish teller-of-tales named Varric, has been captured by the authorities who want to find out what happened and the depth of your character's involvement. He essentially "narrates" the game.

In a change that disappointed a lot of fans, you can only create your character to an extent. You can no longer choose your race or your backstory - instead, you are Hawke, a human whose family fled from Ferelden due to the Blight from the previous game (you can still choose your appearance, gender, class, and general personality, though).

Your family washes up on the shores of Kirkwall, an independent city-state in the Free Marches. You escape being confined to the slums with the other refugees, but only by indenturing yourself in servitude to either a band of mercenaries or a band of smugglers (one of your first choices in the game). Before long your prowess as a problem solver gains you a reputation and more people in Kirkwall start coming to you for help and trusting your decisions. As you gain power and prestige, the problems you're expected to solve get understandably bigger.

The Setting
One aspect of the game that really rubbed some fans the wrong way was the setting - in the last game, your adventurers were able to traipse all over the nation of Ferelden - through forests and mountains and castles and caves. In Dragon Age: II, you're confined to the city of Kirkwall and a few locations immediately outside it.

However, Kirkwall is no ordinary city. It's more like Sunnydale/the Hellmouth from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: a town whose grisly history of slavery and blood magic has made it a breeding ground for demons, corruption, and insanity. So Dragon Age: II has more of a noir feel to it, where even though the focus lies in one location, it's one with a lot of layers and context.

That being said, I can understand how people got frustrated with retreading their steps through all the same places in the city, over and over again, or going to the same (or same-looking) caves again and again while completing different quests. While the setting we get is beautifully designed and rendered, that's really it. There's no sense of exploration or travel that there is with Dragon Age: Origins or Dragon Age: Inquisition.

The Politics
What Dragon Age II lacks in exploration, it makes up for in drama. Your Hawke and her family arrive in a city on the verge of a war from within. As explained in the previous game, mages in this world are able to tap into the magical power of the Fade (the otherworld), but it leaves them vulnerable to manipulation and possession by demons.

Because of this, the Chantry (this world's version of the Catholic Church) decreed that all individuals with magical talents need to be taught in church-sanctioned Circles and guarded by Templars who are trained to take down any mage who looks too demony. Templars are also trained to hunt down apostates - mages who refuse the Circle system.

But in Kirkwall, the system is broken, with mages and Templars at each others' throats. The mages say the Templars are magic-hating, civil-rights-violating religious zealots whose brutal tactics are driving mages to desperation. The Templars say that more mages are summoning demons and using blood magic than ever before, requiring stricter vigilance. Which side is right? Which side is the greater threat? There are a lot of different stories in the game as your pursue different quests, but the main conflict at the centre of Dragon Age: II is the growing Mage-Templar conflict and which side your character will eventually have to chose.

The Characters
Nowhere is the mage-versus-Templar debate more important than if you are a female Hawke! If you choose to play a female Hawke, your love interests lie on the polar opposite ends of the spectrum. On the one end is Fenris, a runaway elven slave with no memory of his former life thanks to the magical experimentation his mage owner subjected him to. He's very much a believer in "power corrupts" and that mages need to be kept on a leash for the greater good. On the other end is Anders, who believes Circles are prisons punishing innocent magic users for the crimes of a few. And whichever dude you choose, you can bet the other will have a few choice words regarding your decision.

In fact, almost every one of the characters in your party will have a beef with one of the others. Your characters interact not only with you, but with each other, and not always in a friendly way. There are friendships, enmities, and awkward situations between the people in your party - and, as always, these reactions and situations are determined by the decisions that you make. I actually think Dragon Age: II's characters are far more memorable than a lot of the characters in Origins - I'm a particular fan of Captain Aveline, an arrow-straight warrior who grows into a capable authority figure, and Varric, a rakish dwarf-of-all-trades who starts chronicling your adventures.

Also, Dragon Age: II improves on Origins' simplistic Approval friendship system by creating a Friend/Rival system - where, in certain situations, there's actually an advantage to certain characters disagreeing with you.

Ultimately, while the setting leaves much to be desired, and certain aspects of the game feel rushed - the storytelling and the characters are top notch and still very enjoyable. If you're a fan of Origins' combat and exploration, Dragon Age: II might not be the game for you. However, if it's the story, the cinematics and the fantastic character interactions that drew you to Origins, Dragon Age: II more than delivers.
A-

AnimeJune's First Ever Video Game Review: Dragon Age Origins

You didn't think I was much of a gamer, did you? Neither did I, to be honest. As a kid, I howled at my parents for a Nintendo 64 after spending several semi-interesting afternoons with my sisters in our neighbour's basement playing MarioKart and Banjo Kazooie. Once I finished howling over the injustice of receiving a Playstation for Christmas instead, I spent several years enjoyably bouncing along in Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter, and scrolling my way through the Japanese soap operas of Final Fantasies VIII through X-II.

Once I grew up and moved out, I kind of lost interest in videogames. It wasn't that games were getting worse, far from it. To me, they seemed to grow more complicated, more difficult, and demand more investment than I was willing to give. My interests lay elsewhere - in books, writing and blogging. I didn't have time for games, and I didn't really miss them.

So this year, I dusted off my Xbox 360 and realized I hadn't turned it on in over a year. Yes, I'd bought an Xbox 360, and I'd tried Skyrim, LA Noire, and Batman Arkham Asylum, and nothing had clicked. I didn't even use it for Netflix anymore (I had a Blu-Ray for that). I figured it was finally time to give it away and turn my back on gaming for good.

But still, I felt guilty. There were games I'd bought that I hadn't even tried yet. I figured I couldn't give my Xbox away until I had tried every game I'd already bought for it. There was only one game I hadn't gotten around to opening - a secondhand copy of Dragon Age: Origins.

And that one game was enough to suck me right back in to gaming, and in a big way. Dragon Age introduced me to game and storytelling elements I'd never experienced fully in games before, it changed my whole view of gaming and turned it right back into the addictive experience it was in my teens.

The Story
So what's the story? Well, that depends. The main story is that the darkspawn, a race of subterranean demons, have amassed into a horde and are now invading the kingdom of Ferelden in a terrifying phenomenon known as a Blight. Your character, through one way or another, has just been recruited into the Grey Wardens, a secretive order of warriors dedicated to fighting darkspawn. Unfortunately, not long after you're recruited, the Grey Wardens and Ferelden's king are betrayed and slaughtered during a key battle, so you and your ragtag band of survivors, stragglers, and outcasts have to use the Grey Wardens' binding treaties to enlist the aid of the different peoples and races to end the Blight before it overruns the rest of the earth.

Your Story
The aspect of Dragon Age that shocked me the most (and had me scrambling to keep playing) is the the actual power you, the player, have over the story in the choices you get to make. In all the other RPGs I ever played, I controlled a specific character while experiencing a specific story. I didn't get to make any choices - I sat back, experienced the narrative, and continued it by fighting monsters and bosses.

Well, in Dragon Age: Origins, a large part of the story depends on your decisions. Those decisions change the story and actually have far-ranging consequences that can affect other quests in the game. The first choice you can make is your character - depending on your race (dwarf, elf, human) and class (mage, rogue, warrior), you get a different origin story and characters will interact with you differently. Other choices involve your character's personality - you can be righteous and altruistic, or hardened and practical, or sarcastic and only out for yourself.

Other choices are pretty huge, and have major repercussions throughout the game. Your ultimate quest is to amass enough allied forces to take on the darkspawn army and their Archdemon (head honcho). This takes you to several areas in the game, where you will have to complete a major task or quest - and how you complete it determines which type of forces will end up fighting for your side in the final battle. For instance, when your party encounters a mage training school overrun with demons, will you side with the Holy Templars and kill all the mages to eliminate the threat of demons, or will you side with the mages and protect them? Or when the dwarves you want to ally with are too busy with their civil war, which candidate for King will you support?

The best thing is - there are no wrong choices. There are certainly more moral choices, or more effective choices, or more hilariously evil choices (during one mini quest, I could choose between feeding a starving prisoner to get his treasure key - or simply stabbing him and taking it!). In some situations, there are no easy answers - for one particularly difficult quest in which a child is possessed by a demon, you can save him by sacrificing his mother to forbidden blood magic, or you can kill him to defeat the demon. Have fun with that one!

Not only that, but the choices make this game endlessly replayable. You played the game as a casteless, amoral dwarf rogue who romanced Leliana? Why not see how the game plays as a righteous human noble who seduces Alistair? The possibilities are endless.

The Characters
It's not only you fighting out there - you can also collect a varied cast of characters who will fight and interact with you (and with each other, if they're in the same party!). Each of these characters come with their own personalities, backstories and moral codes (or lack thereof) and will react differently to the decisions you make. There's Alistair - the bashful but righteous Grey Warden who shows you the ropes. Or Morrigan - the mysterious swamp witch with her own hidden agenda. Or Leliana - a religious sister who follows you after seeing you in a vision. Or Zevran - an elven assassin initially sent to kill you. And those are just a few.

They're all voiced expertly by talented voice actors (seriously - the voice acting in BioWare games is beyond compare), and their interactions with your character are one of the most entertaining aspects of the game. Not only that, but their loyalty and affection are not guaranteed. If a character disapproves of you enough, they might opt to leave your party - or betray you! Conversely, if their approval rating for you is high enough, they might pursue a more, shall we say, intimate alliance with you (and you can do the same!). It's your story, after all - and what's a story without a romance?

The Rest of the Story (Lore)
There's also a lot of lore. Picking things up or looking at certain things will upload books and information to your Codex. You can easily ignore this if you want. However, if you're like me - a diehard high fantasy reader, this is all delicious, delicious gravy. The worldbuilding in this game is amazing - it borrows from the common tropes regarding elves and dwarves and mages and such, but also adds unique touches to them. The idea of dwarves having a caste system, or elves being a persecuted nomadic people, or the church's control of magic with templars were all really fascinating to me.

Not all of this information is relevant to the exact quest at hand, but it's all interesting - and a lot of it carries over into future games. It gives the game and your decisions some context.

The Actual Game Stuff
Now - the gameplay. It's ... fine. It's serviceable. I played it on Casual - it's fun to explode enemies or decapitate them and there are interesting abilities and potions and stuff, but those things have never been very important to me in games. That may sound ridiculous, but that's the type of gamer I am. I'm a story person - and what I love about Dragon Age is that, instead of feeling like I'm reading an interactive fantasy novel (like with the Final Fantasy games), I feel like I am the hero of a fantasy novel. The combat and the game elements contribute to that, definitely, but all those other games I played and got tired of - they all had great gameplay elements. They just didn't have the story and the choice-based aspects.

That being said, from my inexperienced perspective, the gaming aspect is pretty sweet. Every time you level up you have the choice to improve certain aspects of your character (stamina, willpower, strength, cunning, etc) as well as learn new skills required outside combat (herbalism, lock picking) and in combat (spells, weapon moves, etc). There are also Tactics - you have the choice to actually program how your supporting party characters will behave in a battle. You can program them to use a certain spell if they're surrounded, or come to your rescue if your health is low - or you can leave it alone entirely as I did and let the automatic tactics work for you.

That's basically why I love this game - it can be as difficult or as easy as you want it to be. You can play on Casual, like me, and enjoy the story, or you can play it on Nightmare (the hardest setting, where you can actually do damage to your own party members if you're not careful enough) with strategically-programmed Tactics.

This is an older game - ha! It's from 2009! - but an enjoyable one nonetheless. I'd recommend it to any serious fantasy fans - and most especially to people who have played the new Dragon Age: Inquisition who want some more background information on what came before.
A+

"The Innkeeper's Song," by Peter S. Beagle

The Word: The Innkeeper's Song was one of those hidden literary gems that I picked up by chance at a remainders bookstore and immediately fell into. Written by the same dude who wrote the novel (and screenplay!) for The Last Unicorn, it was one of those transformatively good novels I was a little hesitant to read again, for fear that lightning wouldn't strike twice.

The novel centres around three strange, fascinating women who are drawn to the same inn. Lal is a storytelling warrior tracking the distress call of her former mentor, Lukassa is a drowned girl who was resurrected from the river by mysterious magic, and Nyateneri is a wanderer fleeing the murderous members of her former convent.

After arriving at the inn, the three women discover they're connected - Lal and Nyateneri were taught by the same old wizard at different points and Lukassa was revived by one of his spells. This same wizard, it turns out, is in rather dire straits and the women will have to band together and combine their unusual skills to rescue him.

The main plot (save The Wizard) is kind of weird and thin and not all that important in the grand scheme of things. It's a large, easily identifiable story that binds together the host of smaller stories that make up the bulk of the novel. Smaller stories involving the three women and their respective cultures and pasts, their ties to The Wizard, the employees of the inn (such as put-upon stableboy Rosseth), outsiders like Lukassa's fiancé and Nyateneri's shapeshifting fox companion, and their interactions with others.

The Innkeeper's Song is a surprisingly dense book, packed with lush description and tantalizing hints of various exotic worlds lying just at the margins of the main environment. Sometimes - at least during this particular reread - it felt a little too dense, but it could also have just been my frame of mind at the time that made the reading experience slower than I wanted. That part of me wanted more of a meat-and-potatoes, get-to-the-point story, instead of the pleasant, descriptive ramble The Innkeeper's Song is.

It remains a weird, subtle, meandering and unique book about three awesome magical ladies (two of whom are POCs ... one of whom is not as much of a lady as the others) and a truly bizarre/hilarious scene involving a fourway menage where not everyone remains the same gender they were when they started.

If you're looking for a diverse, original stand-alone fantasy, you can't do much better than The Innkeeper's Song.
A

Reread Rollout: "The Giver" by Lois Lowry

So, for the first book on my Reread Rollout, I decided to reread that life-ruiner of required school reading: The Giver.

Kids either hate this book or love this book, but few, I suspect, ever forget reading it.

BECAUSE IT'S A LIFE RUINER.

The Giver is the great-grandma of the current dystopian YA trend. Our hero, Jonas, is a 12-year-old boy who lives in an idyllic Community where everyone has their proper place. There is no starvation, no poverty, no strife, and once a member of the Community turns twelve, their career is chosen for them based on careful study of their interests and skills. Lowry uses only a few succinct chapters to craft the idea of this "perfect" world where everyone is taken care of.

This lasts until Jonas turns twelve and is chosen to become the next Receiver of Memories, and has to watch as his perfect world is torn apart piece by piece. The Receiver's job is to remember all the messy, wonderful, unpleasant, chaotic crap the Community intentionally forgot/did away with in order to preserve order. As Jonas learns more, he eventually learns the darker ways in which the Community preserves order. Oh God, the scene with Jonas' dad and the box. THE BOX. If you've read the book, you know the scene I'm talking about.

I'm pleased to say The Giver is every bit as potent as it was when I read it as a young adult. The recent deluge of Hunger Games and The Knife of Never Letting Gos and Divergents have done nothing to dull the surprising razor-slash of revelation halfway through this book. The Giver is dark and horrifying without being explicit, and ambiguous without being unsatisfying. I ached for Jonas - ridiculously young by today's YA standards - and everything he had to suffer and learn.

And the decades have tarnished none of this novel's relevancy, either. The only thing scarier than what the founders of the Community gave up is knowing what the current members are giving up without even knowing it. It makes you think about the sacrifices we allow others to make for us in the name of safety and order.

So yeah, The Giver ruined my life again. It still packs a punch.

Don't watch the movie.
A-

December in New York: Day Two

Friday morning, we ate a relaxed breakfast in the Library Hotel's comfortable Reading/Breakfast room before going out to explore. The weather was cool, but only on par with a brisk Canadian spring, so we had no issue walking everywhere.

Opening my mouth the day before had released me from my misery - I felt anxiety and twinges of sadness and panic here and there, but I allowed myself to experience it and it passed through me instead of building up, so I was able to enjoy myself infinitely more. Mum and I spent the morning poring over the elaborately-coiffed dolls in the Lord and Taylor windows, posing next to the New York Library Lions, comparing the candy version of the Empire State Building to the real thing, and goggling at the absurdly high-tech window display at Macy's (which involved holograms, animatronics, green screens, and sharp metal Christmas trees that transformed into stars).

The first time I ever visited New York, I succumbed to the "I'm in a movie" feeling, being surrounded by so many recognizable landmarks and buildings - so being in New York in December felt like being in one of those cheesy, wonderful Christmas films. All of a sudden, I was excited again by bright lights and toys, enthusiastic sidewalk Santas, and smiling doormen in suits who opened every door.

Macy's was pretty shameless in its Christmasness, indoors and out, but when you're the Macy's on the 34th street (where that "Miracle" occurred), you have a reputation to protect. We rode old-fashioned, clacking wooden escalators from floor to floor. We didn't get into Santaland - the line was (unsurprisingly) insanely long - but the glimpses we saw convinced us that Christmas at Macy's was Serious Business.

After that, came the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I'd already been, so I let Mum take the lead. We walked into (and then quickly out of) an unsettling exhibition of Balthus' fixation on underage girls and cats before exploring the section of religious art - I quite enjoyed the enormous nativity scene. We avoided sculpture (Mum had just gotten back from Rome the month before, and was "completely sculptured out") so we instead shifted our focus to a fascinating exhibition on musical instruments. We walked through the evolution of the flute, the guitar, and the harp - we even saw a "cross harp" which is an X-shaped instrument composed of two slanted harps. God only knows how many hands you'd need to play it.

As much as we loved the artwork and the instruments - we loooooved the gift shop. There is nothing like the Met gift shop. We both bought beautiful gifts and souvenirs, and I managed the rather impressive feat of buying my mother a massive art book on instruments with her own discount card, while she stood ten feet away, without her finding out.

After that, we broke for lunch at the Museum's cafe. And wow. The museum cafes in NYC do not mess around - none of this reheated soup and sandwich cafeteria nonsense they have back home. My chicken soup had quail eggs in it, with Yukon gold potato chips, and Mum discovered the best-tasting espresso outside of Italy itself.

After that, we returned to the hotel to relax. And I mean relax. I mentioned the Library Hotel's narrow corridors and hatbox-sized rooms, but not how the hotel compensates for that with their plush, impeccably comfortable Reading Room. Cozy furniture, soft music, free coffee and snacks (with Prosecco and cheese after 5pm!), it was the perfect place to curl up and read after a day of adventuring. It had none of the sanitized, transitory air of a hotel lobby. New York City is amazing, but it's intense and often overwhelming, and the Reading Room was an oasis of calm where one could pass time without feeling like they were wasting it. On those other, horrible New York trips, where I spent hours glumly hiding out alone in my hotel room, I really could have used a Reading Room like the Library Hotel's.

We had supper at the hotel's restaurant, Madison and Vine, which was somewhat less than appetizing (Mum ordered spinach on the side, and was served enough spinach to give Popeye a stroke), and then dashed out into the rain to the Shubert Theatre to see Matilda the musical. While it was snowing in Canada, it was only raining here, but enough to leave us quite washed up and bedraggled by the time we squished into our theatre seats.

Worse, we wound up sitting in front of a tribe of unmannered hillbilly rubes who talked during the entire show. And I mean the entire show, not just a wee bit too long after the curtain rose. Their uncultured patriarch performed quite a soliloquy about spilling his frozen margarita down the front of his pants and "freezing his boy parts" (direct quote). The only possible explanation is that the parents assumed Matilda was a "children's show," and only worthy of their children's attention, despite the fact that they must have paid upwards of $500 to take them all out to see it.

And they would have completely ruined the evening for me and my Mum, if Matilda had not been absolutely amazing - the clever set design, the brain-twisting lyrics, the stellar performances quite drowned out (most of) the complaints about Mr. Hillbilly's genital hypothermia. Both Mum and I were blown away by the energy and the music and the magic. I was so happy - my first Broadway experience (Book of Mormon with Josh Gad and Andrew Rannels) was everything I could ask for and I wanted it to be the same for Mum, and it was!

The musical version is quite a darker beast than the American film adaptation. Murder, child abuse, telekinesis - it's the same events played out in the book and suggested in the film but put under a different focus. While still child-friendly, it has an edge to it I really enjoyed. The actor who played Miss Trunchbull (a drag role), was absolutely phenomenal - from celebrating her long-ago hammer throwing victory with a triumphant ribbon dance to tossing a student out the window by her braids (one of the most delightful instances of stagecraft I've ever witnessed), Miss Trunchbull was a formidable villain.

And the soundtrack? I've already listened to it from start to finish about a hundred times since. And here ended the second day of our NYC trip.

December In New York: Day One

I sort of have a love-hate relationship with New York City.

My first trip to New York (for RWA Nationals 2011) was everything a prairie kid with a love of 1940s musicals and cop shows could ask for. My first ever Broadway show: Book of Mormon with the original cast. I wandered goggle-eyed through the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fed a pretzel to the world-weariest pigeons I'd ever seen, tramped through Central Park without a map.

The second time I went, for Book Expo in 2012, was a carriage-horse of a different colour. I had my first brush with serious anxiety. Suddenly, I felt alone, and scared, and New York morphed into this grey, claustrophobic labyrinth of strangers, garbage-strewn alleyways and bedbug-infested corners.

I figured that was a fluke, but when I returned in 2013, it escalated. I had a full-on panic attack on the train ride from Newark to Manhattan. My worry about my food allergy evolved into a massive phobia that restricted my diet to bananas and yogurt. I felt depressed despite being surrounded by hundreds of women with the same interests as me.

I came home from that last trip at midnight and stayed up three hours more to wash my laundry, vacuum and disinfect my luggage, and painstakingly inspect everything I brought home with me for parasites, bugs, or dirt of any kind. And it took a full week after that before I could eat comfortably and go to sleep without inspecting my sheets. By the end of that trip, I was convinced you couldn't get me to return to New York City if you put a gun to my head.

So why the blog post? Well, it's been exactly a year since the time I got over that fear and returned to the Big Apple for one of the most memorable Christmas seasons of my life.

After the last two disastrous trips, what could possibly tempt me back to that squalid, insect-infested island? A hotel. A very special hotel.

The Library Hotel. A glorious, boutique hotel blocks away from the flagship branch of the New York Public Library, it boasted plush reading areas, exceptional service, literary-themed cocktails, rooms based on library categories, books in every room - and one hell of a high price tag. And in April 2013, I won a two-night stay there thanks to their haiku contest on Twitter.

And even then, I almost didn't take them up on their once-in-a-lifetime offer, until my dearest mum decided she would come with me, as part of a combo Christmas-birthday celebration, to celebrate December in New York with me and keep my anxiety at bay. 

Day One

Mum and I few out on a Thursday. We arrived in Newark and grabbed a cab just in time to hit rush hour traffic in the Holland Tunnel, which chewed us up and spat us out close to the Garment District. Mum marvelled over the small shops dedicated to only zippers, spandex or tassels (a whole shop of tassels!), while we passed a deli with a sign that read, "We cure our own brisket ... and our chicken soup cures everything else!"

When we reached The Library Hotel, we discovered it wasn't only full of books - it was shaped like one. Like an enormous hardcover volume of brick, it has a wide front and an extremely narrow side. In all else, the Library Hotel exceeded expectations - but not in actual physical size. We manoeuvred our bags through the tiny entrance and to the narrow front desk and up the cramped elevator to our, uh, compact rooms (my room was Poetry because I won the Poetry contest, and my mother's was Dramatic Literature).

However, despite the lovely hotel, my anxiety was a hardy beast, undeterred by rapturous TripAdvisor reviews and designer soaps. It was determined to reach out its long, cold fingers and find every little fissure of doubt in my "perfect" trip and widen them into flaws impossible to ignore. The threat of bedbugs. The possibility of allergies. The incredible expense, and the pressure to enjoy everything, absolutely, all the time or else all that money would be wasted.

It followed me out into the street as Mum and I followed the stream of people exploring the Christmas lights on Madison and Fifth, the enormous tree at Rockefeller Plaza. We had to hold hands and walk single file through all the crowds. The Cartier building was done up like an enormous gift with glowing red ribbon and shining panthers climbing up and down the building. Harry Winston was covered with glittering diamonds (Mum actually knocked on the door to inquire about the enormous emerald pendant in the window - "10 million dollars," the attendant replied). Another building had an entire Advent calendar projected onto its face, and yet another jewellery store was encircled by a giant, gem-encrusted serpent.

And yet, that first night was a bit of a nightmare. Depression is a bit like a snowball rolling downhill - it accumulates. First I felt miserable, than I felt miserable because I was miserable because this was Christmas! In New York! And it had cost so much money! We finally paused to sit down after exploring FAO Schwartz - and I had to tell Mum the truth. I cried. I remember feeling so ashamed. Mum and spent so much time and money and effort to get me here so I could have my dream trip and I was so ungrateful and broken and selfish because I couldn't enjoy it.

But actually talking about it, about my fear and sadness, felt like loosening a pressure valve. Mum admitted she was scared, too, and that she felt the same way on her first days in Paris and Rome. New York City at Christmastime is far different from our hometown in Canada. We were still transitioning. We were still adjusting. We would feel better tomorrow. Sometimes, when you're feeling scared or pressured or sad, it can help just to be reminded that the feeling is temporary and will go away. And one should never allow oneself to feel pressured to enjoy anything.

I found the first of many Christmas presents that night: Mum and I walked into a store called the Art of Shaving, where I found a luxurious badger hair shaving brush and high-quality shaving soap for my dad (one year later, he's still addicted to the stuff, which he has to buy through Sephora now since Art of Shaving isn't in Canada yet).

"City of Dragons," by Robin Hobb

Reviewer's Note: This is going to be a little different from previous fantasy reviews, simply because I read this book a bit of a while ago, and I wasn't able to review it due to work, NaNoWriMo, and general Life Stuff.

So I'm running on memory!

So the first book of this series, Dragon Keeper, didn't wow me, but Dragon Haven blew me away with how easily it fixed the problems with the first book, advanced the plot, and developed the characters. My expectations were pretty high for City of Dragons.

Unfortunately - it's a bit of a filler book. Scratch that, it's entirely a filler book. The plot moves forward a couple of inches, but otherwise, it's entirely a set-up to what is presumably the final book in the quartet, Blood of Dragons.

The dragons and their keepers have finally reached the fabled Elderling city of Kelsingra. The only problem? A wild, uncrossable river stands between them and their destination, and the only dragon who has successfully crossed it is Heeby, the first dragon to master flight. If the other dragons want to reach the city and unlock its secrets, they'll have to force themselves to learn to fly or remain trapped on the rain-drenched shore. This is especially difficult for the arrogant, intractable dragon Sintara. Her first attempt to fly ended very badly and she's too proud and vain to admit that she's terrified of trying again.

Another issue arises regarding the fate of Kelsingra. Alise wants to preserve the Elderling city exactly as it is, to research it and finally discover the secrets of the Elderlings and why they disappeared. On the other side of the issue, Rapscal and some of the other keepers want to actually use the city and its contents rather than protecting it like a dead relic. On top of that, once the existence of Kelsingra becomes publicly known, it'll only be a matter of time before treasure hunters descend to try and wrest it from their grasp to sell it piece by piece.

Hobb also grooms more characters to become future antagonists (such as the Duke of Chalced and Alise's Evil Gay Husband Hest) and explores more on the theme of female sexuality, but otherwise, the story doesn't progress terribly far. I'm still looking forward to the final book, but perhaps my expectations will be more tempered this time.
B

I'm Late! I'm Late! Drive-By Reviewings

Okay, my bad.

I fell a little behind on reviewing. Okay, a lot behind. For several reasons, some of which weren't my fault but most of which totally were.

I was promoted to a new position at work (the day job), I've become (officially!) an editorial assistant at Entangled (a second job), I signed up for NaNoWriMo, and I discovered obsessively-absorbing role-playing video games.

The result: not a lot of time or inclination to review. After a stressful day of new-job training and reading manuscripts, I was more in the mood to explode darkspawn and romance knights in Dragon Age (which I will also be reviewing soon!). Now that NaNo is over and I have a bit more time on my hands, I'm just in time for my Annual Re-Reading Month.

But for now, let's recap the books I did read in October and November that aren't super-special enough to merit their own reviews:

Just Listen, by Sarah Dessen.

Yes, I finally read my first Sarah Dessen. From what my YA-focused blogger friends tell me, she's kind of the First Lady of Contemporary YA.

My first impression wasn't wholly strong - her language seemed too bare and simple for my taste, but she slowly and surely hooked me in so by the midpoint, I was pretty strongly invested in her heroine.

Our protagonist, Annabel, is someone incapable of speaking her mind for fear of hurting others. She experienced a terrible trauma at the end of the previous school year, but she can't tell her family - with them so focused on her older sister's recovery from an eating disorder, and her mother's history of depression, she can't bear to add to their burden or risk undoing her mother's progress. But the truth is eating her up inside.

The novel is all about truth-telling, and believing you're important enough to be heard, and Dessen aptly conveys how difficult it is for Annabel to speak up for herself and put herself above (or at least on the same level as) others. The novel has a deceptively simple start that reveals itself as more layered later on. However, it wasn't a perfect book. I felt the romantic interest's obsession with honesty was a little over-the-top and unreasonable, even with the novel's theme, and the treatment of rape and rape victims seemed a bit simplified by the novel's end, but otherwise, I understand where Dessen's fans are coming from.

The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender, by Leslye Walton.

I had to read this novel for the FYA Bookclub, and let's just say this book sparked a lot of ... debate. And by debate, I mean rage.

The story explores three generations of women all leading to Ava Lavender, a girl born with wings. The story meanders along through unreliable narrators and magical realism - Alice Hoffman levels of magical realism. Spells, ghosts, girls with bird parts, all that jazz.

Walton is a splendid writer, and 90% of the novel is fine, if unfocused and a bit derivative. The ending, however, absolutely kills this novel - spoiler and trigger warning: the climax (not the conflict, but the climax) of the novel comes when Ava is brutally raped and mutilated by an obsessed stalker. And all of her family's  problems are solved by how they rally around and care for her.

Nothing in this novel - not the story, not the tone, not the theme - suggested or fit with a brutal rape. That event doesn't fit organically within the plot at all. Moreover, the rape is used as a disgusting plot device to better the lives of other characters, not the actual victim. Ava's character doesn't change or progress. In fact, she recovers and gets a boyfriend within the span of the epilogue and gets magical new white wings FOR SOME REASON. WTF. Mindbendingly stupid and offensive garbage.

Please, please, let's not make Magical Rape a trope.

Ravishing the Heiress, by Sherry Thomas

I'm still a general fan of Sherry Thomas, and this novel wasn't terrible, but that's about it.

This novel - wasn't terrible. It was interesting enough but it didn't grab and wow me like her earlier novels. Our heroine, Millie, is a merchant-class heiress whose parents arrange for her to marry a debt-ridden earl named Fitz. Millie falls for Fitz immediately, but discovers Fitz is deeply, passionately in love with another woman - someone he now has to give up in order to save his family from ruin.

Fitz ... does not take this well. He's such a flamboyant ass about what a terrible SACRIFICE he had to make by marrying Millie, that Millie spends the next six years of their marriage keeping her feelings under wraps and allowing him to pursue his various emotionless, extramarital flings. However, when Fitz learns that the former love of his life is now widowed, he plans to leave Millie to set up a household with his ladylove - but not before "fulfilling his end of the bargain" and giving Millie a baby.

There were certain things I liked - Fitz finds it difficult to reconnect with his former love as he slowly comes to understand how meaningful the last six years of marriage with Millie have been to him. His attraction to Millie grows out of their deep and abiding friendship rather than instant lust. But their actual romantic development is remarkably spare on the page, and Millie is almost pathological in her emotional repression (not that I can blame her). It was a pleasant and even a relatively original romance, but I feel the romance was lacking.

The False Prince, by Jennifer Nielsen

Here was another extremely-hyped novel that just underwhelmed me. Sage is an orphan who's picked up off the street along with two other orphans by an unscrupulous, obsessed noble determined to save his nation at any cost.

The nobleman reveals that the king, queen and crown prince were recently poisoned by an unknown party. The truth of their deaths is not publicly known yet, but once it gets out, their nation's enemies will waste no time in taking advantage of the political chaos. However, if another viable heir to the throne is discovered in time, the crisis may be averted. The noblemen chose orphans who best resembled the long-lost second prince who was supposedly killed by pirates years before, and he plans to train them to impersonate the kingdom's last heir. The most convincing fraud will accompany him to the capital - but the other two will become dangerous loose ends.

None of the characters here were particularly interesting. Sage was kind of a smarmy know-it-all, and the "twist" near the end of the novel had me rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness of it. The novel was just boring from beginning to end and there's not much else I can say about it - I read it a while ago and nothing else remained memorable enough for me to recall today.

And that's it for now! More reviews to come later.