I was going to call this the "I'm sick as a dog" edition but I opted for that perfectly placed quote from the new Thursday Next novel instead. Sickness descended upon our house on July 4th when my son woke up with a lovely stuffed up nose (and then proceeded to sneeze it all over me) which advanced to cough, fever, wheezing (hello asthma) and general feel-like-crappedness. I thought I dodged it successfully until yesterday morning - stuffed up, coughing and then the fever showed up last night (not nearly as bad as the little guy though). One benefit of being too ill to do anything other than blow your nose and watch Friends reruns though is that you do make serious headway through the the TBR pile. Here are many short reviews on many books started, finished or read in their entirety over the last 36 hours or so. Not all of them were winners, but they did make the time go by.

Thursday Next: First Among Sequels is the latest in the series about the alternate earth literary detective. First, you can not - CAN NOT - read these books out of order. Every one plays on major events from the previous titles and if you picked up First Among Sequels out of the blue you would be equal parts confused and annoyed long before you reached the end of the second chapter. All new readers get over to The Eyre Affair and start from there. For everyone else, I have to say this is the strangest book in the series thus far but it all pulls together by the end in probably the neatest conclusion of any of them (before the teaser for the next book that is).

Let's see, for starters it's set more than ten years after the last book (Something Rotten). Thursday and Landon have three children now, Spec Ops has been closed, and she is working as a carpet layer - sort of. You have to hold on through the first few chapters (thinking the entire time what the hell?!) as Jasper Fforde lays out what has changed and what has stayed the same. Thursday and Landon are still great, her mom and aunt are still dotty, Spike is still hunting the undead and Jurisfiction is still your basic site for all kinds of book hilarity. (The Bennetts - as in Jane Austen's Bennetts - play a fun part this go-round). Once the plot gets rolling you see that Fforde is riffing on reality television, dropping read rates, time travel and how incredibly emotional poetry can be. ("Whereas Story is processed in the mind in a straightforward manner, poetry bypasses rational thought and goes straight to the limbic system and lights it up like a brushfire. It's the crack cocaine of the literary world.")

I will admit that I was concerned at first that maybe Fforde was tired of the series but after settling into the story I found myself falling for it more and more. The plot is not so hot out of the gate in this one, but in the end I found it just as satisfying as the previous books. Actually, I might have liked it even more as there is a lot more depth than a simple mystery to solve. So Thursday Next: First Among Sequels was very good! Now onto a couple of books that were not. (Oh - and the book description on amazon and Powells for First Among Sequels is totally wrong - it's not about a serial killer loose in the bookworld. That is actually a very minor plot point that blows up at the end of the book as a teaser for the next volume. I have no idea why the PR folks are selling this so wrong, but you can check out Fforde's personal site for an accurate description.)

Something Rotten by Alan Gratz (not to be confused by the Thursday Next title of the same name) is a modern take on Hamlet (of course it is!). I thought the idea sounded great - teenage Hamilton's family owns paper mills in Denmark, TN (cute), his father has died suddenly, his mother has married her former brother-on-law also quite suddenly and Ophelia is a local environmental protester picketing outside the gates of the family operation. Hamilton hates his uncle/stepfather and when his best friend Horatio visits from school the two discover that Hamilton's father has left a video tape in which he claims someone is trying to kill him and pleads with Hamilton to solve the murder. And the word "dioxin" is used on the tape.

Okay. Wait a minute.

This is 2007, so if you get a video from a dead person who claims someone is trying to kill him and the very lethal drug dioxin is mentioned (hello Viktor Yushchenko) wouldn't you head your ass over to the nearest police department and get an autopsy going? (Although here's another sticking point - when really really rich guy suddenly dies why wasn't there an autopsy done in the first place?) But of course Hamilton is convinced he - with all of his high school wisdom - is better equipped to get to the bottom of things on his own. (Yeah, right.) Then the two guys go back home for the reading of the will - which hasn't happened yet even though Dad has been dead for months and Mom remarried - and find out that Dad has left everything to Mom. So Hamilton is totally screwed.

Again - wtf? Dad leaves his son a tape specifically saying he thinks someone is trying to kill him and if he should die suddenly he wants Hamilton to figure out what happened but doesn't alter his will to leave a single thing to his son - even if it's just in trust. And of course Hamilton spazzes out but refuses to go to the cops - AGAIN - and faithful Horatio hangs in there because that's what guys do and Mom decides - at the reading of the will! - to sign half of everything over to her brother-in-law. Huh? (I was also confused by how if the company was a family company why the uncle wasn't part of it already.)

That is when Something Rotten lost all credibility for me. I did like the idea, but I was getting bogged down way too many times with questions. There was no way that anyone in their right mind wouldn't go to the police with that videotape and there's no reason to think that Hamilton isn't a bright guy who would do the right thing - until he just spontaneously doesn't. That was too convenient of a plot point for me and as the whole book hinges on it, I quit reading.

Moving along, Ben Ehrenreich's The Suitors is a contemporary and very "artsy" (meaning unconventional format, the author talks directly to the reader, there's not way to know when or where the story is set, etc.) retelling of The Odyssey. This go round we have Payne and Penny who find a bad love between them and fall hard and wicked for life together. It's all very fucking and drugging and pissing each other off and I felt like I was in a rated R version of that Leo and Clare Danes remake of Romeo and Juliet - and trying to figure out what the hell was going on but still enjoying myself a bit. Here's part of what appealed to me as very honest of any bad love romance (this is after they run away together):

A fight ensues. Do you really want to see it? I'll summarize. Payne calls Penny a bitch and barely stops himself from smacking her. Flattered by this sudden passion, Penny smiles and opens the freezer to pour another drink. She pours one for Payne too, but he throws it against the wall. The bricks are fake, so the glass falls intact to the linoleum and bounces. Payne accuses Penny of not appreciating all that he has done for her. She confesses she does not. He calls her an ingrate, and other things besides. She calls him an eunuch and suggests that she has little to be grateful for. Sinking a level or six, Payne reminds Penny that she was sucking off an entire county until he thought to rescue her. She throws her glass at his head (missing him but shattering the glass door of the new convection oven) and sinks another dozen notches: she lies, and implies that at least some of those boys knew how to satisfy a girl.

They make up - of course, as bad love is always about ripping each other's hearts out and then making up but Ehrenreich has done a fine job of making Payne and Penny real to the readers. It was pretty damn raw to read, but I got what he was trying to do.

And then he totally lost me.

From starting the relationship to building a house, Payne suddenly changes and gets a bunch of druggie teens to follow him and they start robbing everyone in the town (no name, no country, no clue) for whatever they want. The teens follow because they are bored (this seems almost like how a gang would develop) and because they think Penny is all that and a bag of chips. Payne gets rich from all this and gets really good at being a thief and is also pretty much killing anyone who gets in his way (along with the gang) so there are dead children, old people, cute and fuzzy puppies - you name it - lying in their wake. Then a government asks Payne to go to war for them and he agrees but most of the others refuse - it's all getting a bit too real for them. Payne leaves (this would be Odysseus departing for Troy) and the teens all begin to vie for Penny's love. (This would be "the suitors" trying to capture "Penelope's" heart) and then...and then I could not figure out what the hell was going on and more importantly I really no longer cared. Payne is killing lots of people, the suitors are running around like crazy people, Penny has Payne's kid and writes him long letters and it ends in a huge bloodbath (there is a prologue showing this) and I couldn't figure out why I was supposed to care about any of them.

This is a case where I think you kind of need the historical context to really follow these characters - because otherwise they are just a bunch of bat crazy addicts who you wish would die.

Lots of reviewers called The Suitors many wonderful things and maybe it is if you can find the story. I couldn't and I got tired of trying. I think Ehrenreich was saying some important things about war here - but I disliked everyone involved so much I didn't stick around to hear them. And that was the end of The Suitors for me.

Nicola Griffith's And Now We Are Going To Have A Party came highly recommended from Gwenda and Sharyn November. I was very interested in Griffith after reading Always (which should be up in the new issue of Bookslut any minute now....), so I splurged with the IRS tax return and ordered her very coolly designed memoir. It arrived in a cardboard box with five small books, a CD of Nicola singing (she once fronted a band) and several additional papers such as scratch-n-sniff cards, etc. I'm a sucker for good design and I love to reward a publisher who goes the extra mile to make a book fun to experience as well as read. As for the memoir itself, well I enjoyed it a lot. Griffith is from England and she covers her growing up years in a fairly typical middle-class family, her difficult decision to come out as a lesbian (the second in her family) and her many years of doing a hell of a lot of drugs while she found her way in the world (and watched her younger sister lose hers). She also attended Clarion, decided to really become a writer and found the love of her life, American Kelley Eskridge. The story ends when Griffith moved to America - and leaves us all hanging as to WHAT HAPPENS NEXT! ha!

I have read several books about writing by authors like Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Julia Alvarez and found something in each of those that deeply impressed me. I know that whole "how to be a writer" section of the bookstore gets laughed at a lot but for many of us writing is not something that we knew how to do - really - when we were growing up. I don't mean putting the words on paper, I got that, but how do you plan a life as any kind of writer? If you want to be a pilot or an engineer or a teacher then your parents throw a party, talk about colleges or training and bask in the glory of raising such a bright kid. Say you want to be a writer and they tell you that would be a good hobby.

Yeah - you know I'm right.

So I'm always curious as to how writers got here from there - how did they find a way to make it all happen. Griffith does a superb job of telling that part of life as well as basically laying her heart open on the issue of love - both romantic and family. This is a very very honest book and I definitely think I got my money's worth from the whole package. If you know a would-be writer then this would make a lovely surprise gift - and if you know a teen whose struggling with coming out, well you can't go wrong with it there either.

Carpe Diem by Autumn Cornwell is from the new Feiwell and Friends imprint and was a lot of fun. Vassar has her whole life planned out (at least through her PhD - guess the college her folks want her to attend) and that's just the way she and her parents like it. Her summer is full of AP classes so she can get ahead and clinch the valedictorian spot at her private high school. Then her artsy/hippie paternal grandmother (who she has never met) sends her a plane ticket for Malaysia, Cambodia and Laos and an invite to backpack that summer. Vassar and her parents think grandma is crazy but she calls and somehow - mysteriously - manages to blackmail the parents into agreeing on the trip and before you know it she, and her 10 pieces of luggage, are on their way around the world. From there it's all about seeing what's there, learning to LIM (live in the moment) and avoiding getting killed by creepy insects or crazy people. There's also her grandmother's art, Vassar's assignment to write a novel based on her trip (for credit of course) and Hanks - a very very very cute guy who becomes a big part of the story.

Oh and there's also the blackmail mystery, which unfolds in a most surprising and satisfying manner.

Well, I loved Vassar. She thinks she has it all together and finds out she doesn't and also gets a whole new way of looking at the world. I agree this is not a new plot idea but it's done very well here and for many overachieving teens (who are already freaking out over college) this will ring quite true. The grandmother is not a saint - loved that she was human - and the family mystery is awesome to uncover. Vassar's friends (who send her emails throughout the book) are very funny and Hanks, well - he's just freaking awesome.

Cornwell has apparently traveled quite a bit and so the Asian storyline (which rang true to me) is based on her own experiences. As someone who reads a ton of YA fiction I was especially happy to see Hanks as a fully realized and most appealing Asian love interest - he's hot, Vassar wants him and Cornwell makes sure we can understand just what makes this guy so awesome. (He's wicked funny.) I was expecting her to meet a white backpacker, so thanks for giving us Hanks!

All in all, Carpe Diem is equal parts family drama/adventure/coming-of-age and romance. Nicely done all around and I hope it gets read and recommended all over the place. (It's due out in September and I'll be reviewing it sometime this fall at Bookslut.) Oh - love the cover!

Finally, Lobsterland by Susan Carlton. I really really wanted to like this book. It had so many elements of a YA novel that I should enjoy, so I thought I would love it. Teen Charlotte lives on an island that is a short ferry ride from the Maine coast. She has two very young siblings (preschool and baby), quirky parents, a boyfriend she has loved all her life, and a burning desire to see what else it out there. As the book opens she has just received some surprise applications to boarding schools and decided to fill them out (all due in days) without telling anyone - even Noah, the love of her life guy. While struggling to answer the essay questions, (I felt her pain here) we see Charlotte's everyday life and get an idea as to why she would want to leave.

And this is where the story started falling apart for me.

First, Charlotte's mom is an attorney who works in Portland (the mainland town) everyday, but Charlotte is the one who must feed the little kids, dress them and get them to daycare everyday on the ferry - before she goes to school. There is no explanation as to why this is her job. Plus, mom recently had a nervous breakdown and now is on all kinds of pills but still manages to work everyday; it's just at home that everyone has to be extra solicitous of her care. Huh? It doesn't help that the mother is utterly and completely unsympathetic - she does not do a single thing is this story but make demands of everyone else, think only of herself, and drop the occasional verbal bombshell. And then she walks out for a trip to NYC for reasons that no one can fathom but they all accept.

Oookay.

I hated her and I thought everyone else was stupid for putting up with her crap. (There is not a single scene in here of her actually caring for the little kids - everyone else picks them up or feeds them or something except for mom. It's odd.)

Then there's Charlotte's best friend who from the very beginning is obviously after Noah. Now as Noah and Charlotte have been together since they were babies (literally) I couldn't figure out why Susannah would all of a sudden decide to make the moves on him. Plus - she is supposed to be Charlotte's best friend. I get that friends can turn on you but this girl pulled a Exorcist - the author never provided me with any reason why she would be such a bitch or why Charlotte would be friends with a bitch so it never rang true to me. (And don't even get me started on how false Noah's reaction to her behavior seemed.)

And why does Charlotte have to go to boarding school in the first place? She's in high school - why doesn't she just plan to go away to college? She has a decent home, she loves her little brother and sister, her father is a nice guy (the whole subplot about his past seemed very forced) and Noah is THE LOVE OF HER LIFE. So why go now when you could be going in another year or two? And why keep it from Noah when you know it's going to hurt him? And why act surprised when he gets hurt? I mean really - whywhywhywhywhywhywhy.................you get the picture.

I just could not at all fathom the behavior of most of the characters in this book. It wasn't like they surprised me - they acted like they were aliens or something. The thing that really put me over the edge though was this thought from Charlotte as she was watching television. I can't believe Carlton wrote this:

On the only channel we actually get reception for, I watch the pathetic host of that Most Wanted show who "lost" his son a million years ago. Kidnapped? Okay, that's appalling and all, but won't he ever move on?

That is just so wrong, so incredibly wrong. Unless you've been living in a bubble then you know that Adam Walsh was not only kidnapped but murdered - and they only found his head. With the possible exception of JonBenet Ramsey he's the most famous murdered American child in decades. And John Walsh went on to co-found the Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Every piece of child protection legislation that has been written in the past 25 years is because of what changed for John and Reve Walsh and the whole fricking country in the wake of Adam Walsh's murder.

What the heck could Susan Carlton be thinking to make a joke out of this particular family? Is she that callous or did she honestly just not take the five seconds to look up the facts behind the Walsh kidnapping? And what does she hope to convey about Charlotte by having her think such a shallow thing about John Walsh? Is little miss perfect PSAT score (literally) so dumb she doesn't know about Adam Walsh? Or is she supposed to be this callous?I have no idea what the point was. (I'm quoting from an ARC here so maybe her editor realized it was insane to include something like that about John Walsh and deleted it from the final copy - which would be great. It still won't save the story though.)

I read Lobsterland all the way to the end hoping something would happen to make this book the one I think it could have been, but even though there are some bright, honest moments in it, ultimately even Charlotte is making no sense. This one was a good idea that I think crashed and burned. A disappointment for sure.

Back to writing my books now.....if my head would clear for a few minutes of coherent thought anyway........