spring reading list

I only managed to get through six books this quarter being spring and all and so much work to be done outside.

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – a work of fantasy loosely based on Mayan mythology and cosmology, a young girl, Casiopea, is relegated to little more than servant status among her cousins, aunts, uncles, and patriarch grandfather when she and her mother, who defied her father and married a native Mayan, are forced to return to the family home when Casiopea's father dies. Over the years Casiopea's main chore was taking care of her grandfather who had a locked chest in his room and would never talk about it. One day, the family went on an outing leaving Casiopea behind as punishment for not being submissive enough to her only male cousin and heir, Martin, and finding the key to the chest, she opens it. Inside she finds the bones of a skeleton and as she runs her hand along one of them she gets a tiny splinter in her finger which produces a drop of blood and then right before her eyes, the bones rise up, reassemble themselves and form into the most beautiful man Casiopea has ever seen, Hun-Kame, the god of Xibalba the Mayan Underworld. Hun-Kame has been imprisoned by his younger and opposite twin brother, Vukub-Kame, who, unhappy with his brother's rule,  has usurped the throne  and plans to revive the flow of blood from new worshipers. Hun-Kame must find the missing parts of his body...a finger, an ear, an eye, and a jade necklace...to reach his full strength and power and until then he is tied to Casiopea whose life force is sustaining him via the splinter in her finger. If he doesn't remove it, she will die. If he takes too long to gain his full power, she will die and he will become mortal. And so Casiopea and Hun-Kame leave the small town together on the quest to restore Hun-Kame to his rightful place, facing demons and other magical entities. Vukub-Kame sends Martin to apprehend Casiopea and in the end Casiopea and Martin must compete walking the Black Road in Xibalba to the Jade Palace and the lake by the World Tree, two champions for two gods.

Tuesday Mooney Talks To Ghosts by Kate Racculia – I wasn't completely convinced this wasn't a young adult novel even though it was in the adult new arrivals section. I even did an internet search on it after I read a couple of chapters. Apparently it's sort of an ode to The Westing Game which is a young adult novel. Basically an eccentric billionaire who has been diagnosed with an aneurysm sets up a game or a contest, leaving codes and clues around Boston, for any and all to solve after his 'sudden' death at a charity event. Entwined in the search for the treasure is also a murder mystery. There are many characters...loner Tuesday and the ghost of her best friend Abby who disappeared when they were 14, Tuesday's friend Dex, her neighbor 14 year old Dorry, the eccentric billionaire's widow Lyle, the 'banker' of the game Rabbit, the wife and daughter and two sons of a billionaire family with a history of animosity towards the eccentric, and others. I'm not going to try and synopsize this book, too convoluted, but it's a good story and I enjoyed it though it gets bogged down sometimes with unnecessary backgrounds of some of the characters. So, the fortune is found, the players get their rewards, the murder is solved and murderer dealt with, and Tuesday finally realizes that Dex is her best friend and she needs him in her life.

Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia – After her father receives an unsettling letter from his newly married niece, who he took under his wing when her parents died, and unsatisfactory responses from her husband Virgil, Noemi is sent to check on her cousin Catalina. Noemi takes the train from Mexico City to the small village in the countryside where she is met by Francis, a son of the house, who takes her up the mountain to High Place, a magnificent mansion in decline where she is met by Florence, Francis' mother and Virgil's sister, and shown to her room where she is instructed in the rules of the house. That evening she meets the patriarch of the house, Howard an ancient and decaying old man who holds them all in thrall. When she is finally allowed to see Catalina the next day, she finds her cousin to be in good cheer but tired, supposedly recovering from tuberculosis, and is soon ushered out so Catalina can rest. Noemi sets out to explore the house where silence reigns and finds most of it closed off and the rest infiltrated with mold, mold on everything...the walls, the ceiling, the books in the library, the portraits in the halls, the light sconces that are rarely on, the house illuminated mostly by candles and oil lamps, the tombstones and crypt adjacent to the house which is always enveloped in mist. Noemi finds a sort of companionship with Francis who she talks into taking her to the village now and then where she begins to hear stories and rumors of death and murder associated with the house and the silver mine, now closed. Before long Noemi is having strange and frightening dreams and starts sleepwalking again. When she finally decides that she must leave for her own sanity and safety, she finds herself a prisoner and learns what Howard, Virgil, and the house itself have planned for her when they send Francis to relate the history of the family and what exactly is going on, the horror of the house, the horror of Howard, and what place they plan for her in the family. But Francis has become her friend and ally and they plot an escape for Noemi and Catalina. I'll stop here. It's a good story. I like this author who also wrote the first book in this list.

Quantum by Patricia Cornwell – I first picked up a second 'Captain Chase' novel on the new arrivals shelf, scanned the blurb, erroneously thought it a sci-fi novel and went to find the first which I did find but not in the sci-fi section but did find in the alphabetical section. It's a police/detective/science novel set at NASA's Langley Research Center. If you read this book I hope you like detailed descriptions of the science behind the space program, technology, robotics, cutting edge law enforcement, and security. It's too much and much of it unnecessary for the story which never finishes. Got to the last page and only one of the several things the author spent a lot of time on is resolved, the installation of a top secret module on the space station, only referred to as a 'quantum' with no other explanation of what that means or what it's supposed to do, disguised as a student research project so I can only imagine that the next book picks those threads up. Anyway, and I quote the flap...”Captain Callie Chase...a NASA pilot, quantum physicist, and cyber crime investigator” (and here the quoting ends) detects a security breach deep in the tunnels on the eve of this secret mission, a security badge is reported 'stolen' and the woman is found later dead of an apparent bizarre suicide, a suspicious meeting with Callie's former boss implicating her even smarter and more accomplished twin, Carme, in some sort of sabotage, weird passages in italics of her and Carme's past inserted periodically with no explanation, and besides the over the top technical bits there were long passages of details about different character's lives that had nothing to do with the story. I won't be picking up the next book.

The Awakening: the Dragon Heart Legacy Book 1 by Nora Roberts – I used to read a lot of Nora Roberts' trilogies because she's such a great storyteller though I would skip over the blow by blow or rather, lick by lick, highly detailed descriptions of sex. Having a healthy sex life of my own these passages didn't interest me. So this is the first one I have picked up in quite a long time. Philadelphia school teacher Breen Kelly has been told all her life by her mother that she is barely adequate, not quite average and so must always work hard and take the quiet dull path to achieve any success. She worked hard putting herself through college for her bachelor's degree and then her master's in education because according to her mother that's all she could ever expect to be and do. At 23 Breen Kelly, full of anxiety and strange dreams, who has to count every penny to pay off her loans, hates her job. The only happiness in her life is her best friend and roommate Marco and the gay bar where he bartends at night run by her surrogate family Sally, drag queen extraordinaire, and Derrick. One day she notices a strange silver haired man that seemed to be watching her while on her way to tend to her mother's house while she was out of town. Once there, a strange wind blew open a locked filing cabinet door and while cleaning up the papers scattered everywhere she discovers that her mother has been hiding an account in Breen's name worth nearly $4 million. She immediately visits the account manager, removes her mother's name from the account, pays off her student loans, quits her job when the year ends, and heads to Ireland for the summer to find out who she is and what she wants to do with her life and maybe even find the father that abandoned her and her mother when she was 10. She and Marco, who goes with her for a two week vacation of his own, have a grand time and then she settles into the remote cottage she has rented for the summer. One day a dog shows up at the cottage and lures her through the woods to an enormous tree where she falls through the portal into the world of Talamh, the realm of the Fey...fairies, witches, pixies, dragons, et al...where she meets her grandmother and begins to learn who and what she really is, the uniqueness of herself and the power she holds, that she is far from barely adequate as she has been told her whole life  but must find within herself and learn to use that power. And so begins her training to help fight the dark force that would destroy Talamh and through Breen, the human world as well. Unfortunately, I have to wait til the end of November for book 2.

The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab – written in present tense third person omniscient, Adeline LaRue was born in 1691 in a small village in the French countryside. She is born a dreamer, stubborn, cannot imagine that her life will be as the lives of the other girls and women in the village, that she will never ever be allowed to 'live'. And so at 23, on the eve of a wedding she does not want, she escapes into the woods to pray, beg, plead again for a god to hear and listen and come to her aid only she does not pay attention to the gathering dusk, forgetting the warning from the old wise woman in the village who still acknowledges the old gods, to not pray to the gods who answer after dark. A figure steps out of the gloom and Addie, in her desperation, makes a deal. What do you want, he asks her, I want to be free, I want to live, she answers. The price is her soul when she is tired of living and Addie agrees but she soon learns the cruelty built into the deal. She returns home to find her parents don't know her, neither does her friend, neither does anyone and neither does anyone ever remember her, as soon as they step away, as soon as she is out of their sight, she is forgotten so she moves like a ghost through the centuries, because she is now immortal as well, always a stranger, learning how to steal without getting caught, learning how to live with nothing of her own, unable to tell her story or make a mark of any kind. The story moves back and forth from the past to the present slowly revealing Addie's life and her relationship with the Darkness she has named Luc who shows up time and again expecting to collect her soul and every time she refuses to surrender and she pushes at the limits of her deal as she finds ways to make her mark in the arts through others who don't remember her, small proofs that she exists. Then one day after 320 some odd years Addie meets a man who remembers her and her life changes completely. When Henry gets angry at his friends for never remembering Addie, she finally tells him the truth, is able to tell him the truth and he believes her because he also has made a deal. I was about 350 pages in when I started to realize this is a love story, Henry and Addie of course, but more importantly between the Darkness/Luc and Addie. When Addie finally learns the terms of Henry's deal, she makes a new one with Luc. But Addie has learned a lot about Luc in her 300+ years and she has still not forgiven him for the cruelty of the deal she made and as Luc was fond of telling her, words do matter. I liked this book a lot.