Welcome to Fashionista Piranha Book Blog, where a good book is always your best accessory!  Life is too short to waste reading bad literature, especially when there's so many good books out there. If I can keep you from reading one atrocious novel, I've done my job. But if I help you find something you'll enjoy, even better. I've achieved my goal.

I have been reading, writing and reviewing since 2008, so there's a lot to see here.  To read the latest reviews, simply scroll down; in the sidebar to the right I also have the reviews grouped chronologically.  If there's a specific title or series you have in mind, I also have the reviews indexed by the author:

Sometimes, readers of this blog must think I'm obsessed with Christopher Moore in a rather stalkerish way, because he's the only author whose live appearances I ever report about. Although Moore is hilarious in person and really makes it worthwhile to come out to his book signings - funny monologues about life, writing and fake dog testicles - I think his frequent appearances on my blog are more a byproduct of the fact that he's a local author and therefore his events are relatively easy to attend.

That said, Moore kicked off his book tour for Sacré Bleu on April 3rd at Books Inc. in San Francisco, and naturally I was there with my sidekick Jeans. (Her previous blog appearances: Chris Moore, Chris Moore, Philippa Gregory.) We arrived just in time to realize that there weren't any chairs left, so we stood off to the side by the Science Fiction section next to a pile of steampunk titles and Neil Gaiman books. A pretty good place to be, if you ask me.

Can I drop any big, dramatic Christopher Moore bombshells on you? Unfortunately, no. At the beginning of a book tour, it seems, Mr. Moore's a little...unrehearsed. He's not sure what material he's going to be using to make his fans laugh; the rhythm of his speech and jokes isn't quite down. Having seen only the final, polished version that usually comes at the end of his book tours at previous events, it was pretty cool to see the rough version this time.

Moore's always bagging on one state or another, and this time around it was Kansas. Because, y'know, it's Kansas! That is to say it represents the entire Midwest, and like all former Midwesterners who have fled their home state, Moore kinda hates it.

He actually spent a decent chunk of time going over art history, and what exactly was happening in Paris in the late 19th century. With so many artists running around, he got to pick and choose which ones would show up in Sacré Bleu. Renoir liked naked women, especially ones with big bums? Sounds like a fun guy – he's in. Toulouse-Lautrec likes absinthe, hookers and dressing up in kimonos? Oh, he's definitely in – heck, TL is the star of the novel. Degas was anti-Semitic and an all-around dick? He's OUT, reduced to only one or two brief appearances.

During the Q&A, someone asked Moore if he was purposely moving into historical fiction, since several of his recent books have been set in the past. Moore said no, he just tends to go with whatever idea happens to catch his interest at the time, and it's mostly coincidence that his last few books have been historical in nature.

On that note, his next book is going to be set in Venice. It's a sequel to Fool. You know what that means. Othello. The Merchant of Venice. It's gonna be AWESOME!! He also mentioned that he'd love to do a sequel to A Dirty Job someday.

At the end of his talk/question answering, Moore gave away a ton of swag. He just hauled a big grocery bag up to the front and started tossing out audio books, f**kstockings, and hats like an ADHD Santa Claus trying to make up for missing Christmas by nearly four months. Jeans and I didn't manage to snag anything, but Moore was handing out temporary tattoos to everyone who waited in the autograph line, so that was a decent consolation prize.

Sorry there are no pictures this time! We did take some, but Jeans has my camera so they'll have to wait.

It's that time of year when I make my annual pilgrimage up to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. I’ll be leaving tomorrow and returning Thursday. I hope to see three plays:

• Animal Crackers: Groucho Marx running wild in this stage version of the 1930 film? Should be fun! I’ve never seen a Marx Bros. film, but my fiancé insists they are hilarious so I picked this show for him.
• White Snake: An adaptation of the Chinese legend, in which a white snake takes on the form of a human woman, falls in love with a young scholar, and attempts to win him over with the assistance of her friend, a green snake.
• Romeo & Juliet; We all know this story – in this version, the play is set in Alta California in the mid-19th century, as the Americans begin to move into their newly acquired territory.

Curse of the Blue Tattoo
by L. A. Meyer

Second book in the Bloody Jack Adventures; sequel to Bloody Jack
This review contains minor spoilers for Bloody Jack.

After the crew of the HMS Dolphin discovered Jacky’s true identity, she knew it was only a matter of time before they got rid of her. After all, the British Navy can’t have a single girl living on a ship full of men; it’s a scandal waiting to happen. Thus, Jacky is dropped off in Boston at the Lawson Peabody School for Young Girls to become a proper young lady. Although distraught at being separated from her one and only true love, Jaimy, Jacky takes comfort in the fact that her “training” at the school will prepare her for her future role as the wife of a navy officer. But sailing the seven seas disguised as a boy was nothing compared to the difficulties of living with spoiled, catty girls. It seems as if Jacky can do nothing right, and as the months pass without a word from Jaimy she begins to lose her motivation to suppress her wild, impulsive nature.

The book is extremely fast-paced. Jacky is the sort of person who can never sit still for more than a few seconds, so she is constantly in and out of trouble. She sweeps through the city of Boston like a hurricane, bringing havoc to every corner of society. One night she might be down on the docks, dancing with sailors and fraternizing with the local prostitutes. A few days later, she’ll be sitting for afternoon tea in the home of one of the wealthiest families in the area. Every time the narrative begins to settle into a lull, Jacky inadvertently stirs up trouble again. It’s quite exciting, and thankfully the author keeps it all from getting confusing.

One of the things I like about Jacky is that she is such a realistic teenager. Not situationally – her life story is impossible, but that’s part of the fun – but emotionally. She falls in love with Jaimy, and she has that teenage optimism that their love will last forever, overcoming all odds. But after a few months of silence, her eye starts to wander. Jacky she isn’t above flirting with other men to get what she wants, and if one of them should return the affection then what’s the harm in that? Jacky isn’t a slave to her hormones, but the author doesn’t ignore them or pretend they don’t exist, and this makes her believable and sympathetic.

If you get a chance, listen to the audiobook. The narrator is Katherine Kellgren, and she does an amazing job. She brings all of the energy and giddiness of Jacky to her performance…and it really is a performance. She nails variety of English and American accents for the multicultural characters, who hail from both sides of the Atlantic. When there’s a song, she doesn’t merely read it as some narrators would, but croons or belts the lyrics as required. (In fact, I’d love to know how that works – does the narrator have to research these songs to find music for them, or do the publishers provide that?)

5 out of 5 stars


To read more about Curse of the Blue Tattoo, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

The Left Hand of God: A Biography of the Holy Spirit
by Adolf Holl

In the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, God has three aspects: God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit. God the Father, or the “Old Testament” God Yahweh, is the creator who made the universe and actively intervenes in human affairs. He sends angels to smite the wicked and plunges prophets into the body of the whale. Jesus Christ is the human incarnation of God, sent to die for humanity’s sins. Their roles are easy enough to grasp. But there’s the third figure, the mysterious Holy Spirit/Holy Ghost. This amorphous being lacks easily defined traits – sometimes, he’s described as a ‘still small voice’ while at other times he appears as ‘tongues of fire’. In an unusual biography, Adolf Holl seeks to identify and describe the most elusive member of the Godhead.

I approached this book wanting to learn more about the personality of the Holy Spirit. After all, in the Bible both Jesus and Yahweh show joy, anger, sorrow. In Genesis, Abraham and Yahweh debate over how many virtuous men must exist in order for the city of Sodom to be spared destruction. In the New Testament, Jesus is accused of being a glutton because he parties with his friends. But the Holy Spirit remains aloof and distant; he inspires human action on behalf of God but as far as I know, we never really see him directly acting. I hoped that Holl picked up something from the texts that I never noticed, or that he’d combed through two thousand years’ worth of theological debate to present a plausible interpretation.

This is not that book.

“Holy Ghost” is a name for a decidedly Christian doctrine, but Holl applies it universally. So the spirit that narrated the Koran to Mohammad becomes the Holy Spirit. The zeitgeist that led to the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung becomes the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit inspired James Joyce to write novels and Rainer Maria Rilke to write poetry. It’s certainly an unusual approach to the topic, but it leads to a very meandering, episodic sort of biography. Holl hops around in time, jumping from one religious or intellectual movement to the next with only the loosest connection. I tried to keep up, but I constantly felt like I was missing the threads tying everything together.

By the close of the book, the question in my mind was no longer “What is the role of the Holy Spirit in the Holy Trinity?” but rather “Is the author’s version of the Holy Spirit a divinity or simply a figment of mankind’s imagination?” This made for an interesting and entertaining read, to be sure, but ultimately it was a very frustrating journey. One thing I will give the book credit for, though – it definitely made me think about religion, inspiration and underlying spirit of humanity in new ways. If that was the author’s intention, as I believe it was, then it was a very successful book.


3.5 out of 5 stars


To read more about The Left Hand of God, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
by Benjamin Franklin

In a fit of patriotic fervor – or maybe the simple realization that my library’s MP3 audio book selection is really, really limited – I thought it would be fun to listen to Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography. I mean, he’s America’s kindly old great-uncle, a man who managed to snag a spot on the $100 bill despite the fact that he was never president. Also, I was pretty sure he discovered electricity and cribbed his best ideas from a mouse. The point is, it seems like I ought to know something about Ben Franklin, and isn’t it best to hear about his life from the man himself?

So the autobiography begins with an account of Franklin’s lineage – where his family originated in England, brief anecdotes about his father and uncles, and so on – which makes sense, because he’s writing these memoirs for his son, William. Franklin then moves into his childhood and apprenticeship to his brother James, a printer. The siblings don’t get along, so eventually Benjamin runs off to start his own printing business. After several false starts, he creates a successful newspaper and with the lucrative position of printer to the state assembly, Franklin’s doing very well. He’s also very busy man – founding a public library, inventing a new kind of stove, working on the city council, leading a militia unit, and negotiating treaties with Indians. As his business prospers, Franklin also devotes himself to improving his character by striving for moral perfection, the method of which he describes in some detail. Sadly, Franklin died before completing his autobiography, and the story cuts off with Franklin negotiating on behalf of the colonies at the English court, pre-Revolution.

The biggest disappointment by far is the fact that the book ends before the Revolution, so we never hear his own thoughts about his role in the Continental Congress or his ambassadorship in Paris, where he, with John Jay and John Adams, negotiated the Treaty of Paris and officially ended the American Revolutionary War.

But even without his activities during the revolution, Franklin used two or three lifetimes’ worth of energy to fill his days. Reading his autobiography makes me feel like such a slacker! I can’t say I liked that feeling. Perhaps Mark Twain put it best:

His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever--boys who might otherwise have been happy…With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them…[an] affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's pernicious biography. (From The Late Benjamin Franklin.)

For all that, though, it is an interesting read. Franklin writes in a very easy, conversational style that is very easy to follow. Occasionally, it rings of false modesty and glosses over what I suspect would qualify as very juicy gossip. As he pens his memoirs, Franklin is an old man creating the character he wants to pass down to future generations, and his editorial selections reflect this. But that’s OK. I’m sure the many historians who have written on Franklin have dug up the skeletons in his closet, and in the meantime the reader can learn just as much about Franklin based on what he chose to omit as what he ultimately included in his autobiography.


3.5 out of 5 stars


To read more about The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

Duck Prince, Vol. 1
by Ai Morinaga

Reiichi Swan is short, with coke-bottle glasses and a dumpy bowlcut hairstyle. His troubles are only compounded by his social awkwardness; Reiichi is not only ugly but incredibly shy and socially awkward. The only girl willing to talk to him is Yumiko, a classmate who shares Reiichi's love of plants, but she's moving to America. Before she leaves, Reiichi wants to see her one last time, but before he can say goodbye he's hit by a car – and ends up in a coma for a year. While he's out, a plastic surgeon makes completely remakes Reiichi's face and body. But even with his new, pretty face, he's still the same old Reiichi on the inside. Transferred to a new school and given a second chance at high school, can this ugly duckling truly transform into a swan?

This mangafied version of the “The Ugly Duckling” is a lot of fun. From the first page, it revels in silliness. Reiichi is absolutely ostracized by his classmates, for no good reason that we can see save his awkward appearance. He's not a pervert like the class otaku, and yet Reiichi seems to be lower on the social ladder. It turns out that one of the reasons Yumiko is so fond of him is because Reiichi resembles her beloved pet dog Mister...who is a second-rate sorcerer trapped in the body of a dog by one of his enemies hundreds of years before. It is thanks to Mister's magic that Reiichi is able to have his new body – as the dog sarcastically points out, “It would ave been impossible to change your old face into this one by plastic surgery alone! Modern medicine isn't that good!” But in the high school classroom of a more-or-less real world, the inclusion of enchanted dogs and reincarnated magicians doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the story. It's humorous, but a little odd.

Ai Morinaga's drawings fit the story perfectly. Whether using broad, thick pen strokes to create the stocky pretransformation Reiichi or delicately waving lines for the hair of beautiful women, Morinaga tells the story in an easy, clear style. The art is occasionally flowery, as is typical in the shoujo genre, but it's never cluttered or baroque. It's not one of the great, memorable series, but it's an entertaining spin on a classic fairy tale.

The company that was publishing Duck Prince in America went under in 2009 after publishing four volumes of the series, but I do not believe this is the entire run. I think there were six books in Japan, but I don't have a firm confirmation of this yet.

3.5 out of 5 stars


To read more about Duck Prince, Vol. 1, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

Lunatics
by Dave Barry and Alan Zweibel

Two men who couldn’t be more opposite are thrust together in a series of increasingly ridiculous scenarios. Philip Horkman, the nice, mild-mannered owner of a pet shop called ‘The Wine Shop’, spends his weekends as a volunteer referee for the local children’s’ soccer league. During a championship game, he calls a foul on the daughter of Jeffrey Peckerman, a foul-mouthed loose cannon who immediately lashes out at Horkman. A shouting match ensues, but that would have been the end of things had Peckerman not accidentally stumbled into Horkman’s shop the next day while on a liquor run. Peckerman steals a lemur, Horkman pursues him, and before you know it the two have been labeled terrorists and are wanted criminals. Although the two men hate each other with a passion, they’re stuck – and as they fall into one absurd situation after another, the only thing on which they can depend is that no matter how hard they try, neither man can get rid of the other guy.

The book starts out well enough. Each chapter is told by one of the two men, alternating back and forth in the first person. Horkman comes off as a little too nice, but he’s a decent sort of fellow who works hard and appreciates his life, mundane though it may be. Peckerman, by contrast, is an asshole with an anger management problem. He’s racist, homophobic, sexist – if you can think of a negative –ist he’s probably a prime example of it. The two men are night and day, and in the beginning they seem the unlikeliest of buddies. But as they are thrown into increasingly dangerous situations – joining Somali pirates, overthrowing Communist governments, broadcasting Al-Qaida videos – you expect that the two men will overcome their differences and learn to tolerate each other, if not become bosom buddies. That’s the formula, right?

Not here. In Lunatics, the two men never reach a point of reconciliation and friendship, and this is solely due to the character of Peckerman. He is a truly reprehensible individual. If there’s a moment that calls for bravery, you can count on him to do the cowardly thing. If a betrayal will save his skin, he’ll turn his back on you in a flash. He spends half the book either drunk, sh*tting himself, or both. Throughout the story, I kept waiting for him to have an epiphany, a moment of self-awareness or an awakening to a greater calling…but I got nothing. He is a terrible person from start to finish, and he doesn’t once show any sort of goodness. As I kept reading and realizing that a moment of redemption was not forthcoming, it got harder to continue with this flat caricature of a character.

A repetitious pattern sets in, too, following something along these lines: Horkman and Peckerman are kidnapped/forced into a situation they don’t want to be in. Horkman tries to do the decent thing while Peckerman tries to wuss out and/or crap himself. Against all odds, the two men succeed in thwarting the bad guys. Then, out of their control, they are whisked away to a new place and unleashed to do more damage. It is slapstick, to be sure, but the novelty wears off after the third incarnation.

It’s not all bad. There are some very funny moments sprinkled into the crazy mess, including a hilarious send-up of the frenzy of modern media coverage and the American presidential nomination/election process. But it simply isn’t worth wading through the morass of juvenile toilet humor and weak stereotypes.
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.
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I seem to have hit a real dry spell lately; I think this is the third or fourth book in a row that I’ve been decidedly unenthusiastic about.

1.5 out of 5 stars


To read more about Lunatics, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

The Piano Teacher
by Janice Y. K. Lee

When newlywed Claire Pendleton arrives in 1950s Hong Kong, she finds the ‘foreign’ ways of the Chinese completely baffling. A provincial Englishwoman, nothing in her previous life has prepared her for this new world save a talent for playing the piano – a skill that a wealthy Chinese couple, the Chens, would very much like to pass on to their daughter. Claire becomes the girl’s piano teacher. When a small trinket happens to fall into her purse, Claire keeps it – and soon she’s regularly stealing little things from the Chens as a sort of petty revenge against Hong Kong. She further seeks to cure her dissatisfaction with life through an affair with the Chen’s driver, an Englishman named Will. Will once had a beautiful, vivacious lover named Trudy, but their love could not survive the tests of World War II. Trudy still haunts Will, and her constant presence in his mind casts a shadow over any happiness he hopes to find in this life.

The Piano Teacher is a total snore. Split between the two narratives – Will and Trudy in the 1940s and Will and Claire in the 1950s – the book never really brings either time period to life. The characters are pretty unlikable, although I suppose each one has his or her own reasons for rubbing the reader the wrong way. Claire is subtly racist against the Chinese, and seems resentful of any yellow-skinned person who lives better than she does. Trudy is a half-Chinese, half-white woman who never fits in anywhere, so she compensates by being catty and shallow. Will’s a jerk who never seemed to engage with the people around him. I didn’t care about any of these people, so when tragedy swept through their lives it didn’t affect me. And bad things happen in this book! During World War II, Hong Kong was occupied by Japan and many of the Europeans and Americans were rounded up and put into camps, where there is suffering and hunger and broken families. It’s utterly miserable, but without investment in the characters it just felt like a superficial overview of events.

Skip it.

1.5 out of 5 stars


To read more about The Piano Teacher, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

The Little Book
by Seldon Edwards

I first heard about The Little Book several years ago, when I saw Seldon Edwards speak at Book Group Expo. (Notes on the event here.) This novel is one that the author worked and re-worked for decades, and the passion with which he spoke about his work made me extremely curious about it. It only took me four years, but I finally got around to reading The Little Book. (Not a particularly tiny tome, by the way – the name comes from a text within the story, and is not a reference to the size of the Edwards’ novel.)

Stan “Wheeler” Burden, former baseball prodigy and rock and roll legend, is attacked on the mean streets of 1980s San Francisco. When he comes to, Wheeler finds himself in Vienna at the close of the 19th century. Wheeler isn’t fazed by his sudden time travel – rather, he’s delighted. Ever since he was a boy in prep school, Wheeler has heard magnificent stories about the splendor and the beauty and the magic of Vienna, thanks to the stories shared by his teacher Arnauld Esterhazy. Cleverly, Wheeler hunts down Sigmund Freud – currently working on his Oedipus complex – and tells the doctor his life story, convincing him that Wheeler suffers from a massive delusion about time travel. The doctor provides Wheeler with a place to live as part of his ‘treatment’, freeing the 20th century man from the hassle of working and enabling him to wander the city. In the process, Wheeler meets his father – another time traveler who ended up in Vienna after ‘dying’ in World War II – and his grandparents, and the crisscrossing of the various Burdens creates a tangled tapestry whose effects ripple throughout the 20th century.

The novel’s biggest weakness – at least for me – was the absolute perfection of Wheeler, the main character. As a child, he basically (through his mother) writes a philosophical book that founded the American feminist movement. As a teenager, he is a baseball prodigy who winds up playing for Harvard and setting all sorts of records before walking away from it to become a rock star. Not only is he a successful musician, he’s one of the most famous and iconic performers of the 1970s. Naturally, such a man is also ridiculously good looking and wonderful in bed…yet sensitive. In the 1980s, the marvelous Mr. Wheeler publishes a best-selling book based on the notes of his beloved Esterhazy. He’s just so wonderful and talented, that Wheeler – as the author never stops informing the readers – but I find him completely unbelievable and not at all compelling, because he’s clearly too good to be true.

This gasping, fawning hero-worship extends to other characters, too. For example, Arnauld Esterhazy is never referred to as “Professor Esterhazy” or “Arnauld” – he’s always ‘The Venerable Haze’, a nickname provided by adoring students. Freud is always ‘the great doctor’. After a while, it’s just overwhelming, especially with the verbose, wordy prose favored by the author.

Edwards assumes that his reader knows nothing about 19th century Vienna, which is fine – I mean, I didn’t know anything about its history or politics at the time. But there’s paragraph after paragraph of information dumping, and not just about Vienna – he also fills the pages with unnecessary detail about the 1960s, World War II, and it slows the narrative to a crawl. Everything is great and wonderful and epic – but though we’re told this over and over, it’s never convincing because we’re not shown why it’s awesome. To put it another way, The Little Book is extremely nostalgic, but it never clarifies why we should look back to the past with such fondness.

I’d hate to give away the twists of the story, but it only seems fair to warn readers: there’s incest. Freud isn’t the only one thinking about Oedipus complexes, and several characters manage to get wrapped up in some pretty twisted relationships…although it somehow works out in the end.

All in all, the story was definitely not my cup of tea. It was too rambling and the characters far too flat to be engaging. But the time travel was fun, and I’m intrigued enough about the Vienna shown here to seek out more books set in that time period.

2.5 out of 5 stars


To read more about The Little Book, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

Taft 2012
by Jason Heller

He's back...and he's the BIGGEST thing in politics.

After mysteriously disappearing in 1913, the same day his successor was sworn into office, William Howard Taft, 27th president of the United States, has reappeared. A team is quickly assembled to bring Taft up too speed on life in the 21st century, including the foremost biographer on Taft's life and his granddaughter, now a US Senator. As his celebrity grows, the American people find that they like Taft's self-deprecating humor and gentile manners, and a grass-roots movement springs up, calling on Taft to run for the 2012 presidency. Taft – who neither wanted or enjoyed his first term in office – sees the many problems faced by the country and wants to help, but can a man from the early 20th century survive in modern politics?

Now, I am far from a Taft expert, but one thing I know about the man was that he was the only person to be both a President and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But in this tale, Taft disappears in 1913, and the last seventeen years of his life never happened. It's a relatively minor quibble in a fantasy story, but why couldn't the author have simply had Taft disappear around the time of his death, rather than ignoring the high point of Taft's career? It wouldn't have affected the plot in a significant way, but by ignoring a fairly large chunk of history, the story immediately jumped from 'could happen' to 'could happen only in an alternate universe'.

The book pokes fun at the media hoopla of politics and the success of fringe groups like the Tea Party and Occupy movements in changing the national dialogue. When it's doing this, Taft 2012 gets some really good jokes in, and it's funny. The story also highlights many of the major issues today: legalizing marijuana, gay marriage, and food production. Actually, there's a lot of emphasis on food production, because Taft was fat and therefore obsessed with food, ha ha. These jokes weren't nearly as successful, and after a while Taft's delight in stuffing twinkies and hot dogs down his throat became tired.

As I read, I kept thinking, “Why Taft?” I mean, was he chosen to be the time-traveling president solely to tell fat jokes? Much of the humor either stems from his girth or his great walrus mustache. When you get right down to it, he doesn't show much of a personality, so the character could have been played by any of the second-string presidents...but again, Taft was fat and likes to eat when stressed, so let's choose him.

The other thing that bugged me was that Taft really didn't seem surprised by the technology of the 21st century. I mean, look at what we have now that he didn't – TV, cell phones, microwave ovens, the Internet, e-mail, iPods, air travel for the masses, space flight, microphones, nuclear bombs – I could go on and on. But none of it fazes Taft. In fact, he doesn't seem impressed or intrigued by any of it; he just nods his head and either uses the new items or ignores them. I mean, I'm glad it was easy for him, but should it have been? I remember watching my grandparents – heck, even my parents! - struggle with new cell phones or playing computer games, but Taft only needs two or three minutes and he's happily playing Wii Golf with a friend.

It's an interesting idea, and a light quick read. I think it could have been a lot better, but Taft 2012 does have amusing (if highly topical) jokes in its pages. If you need a laugh during the next few months- and goodness, won't we all if the Republicans and Democrats continue as they are? - then Taft 2012 might be fun for you.

2.5 out of 5 stars


To read more about Taft 2012, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

The Women of the Cousins' War
by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin and Michael Jones

This is a trio of biographies of the women who star in Philippa Gregory's Cousins' Wars series: Jacquetta, Elizabeth Woodville, and Margaret Beaufort. Jacquetta was a brave woman; after the death of her first husband, the Duke of Bedford, she defied medieval convention and married one of her husband's employees for love. Together, they raised a large, healthy family that included their daughter Elizabeth. Elizabeth Woodville, a beauty renowned throughout England, married the handsome King Edward but was destined for a life of sorrow. Her two sons became the infamous Lost Princes who were led into the Tower of London by their uncle Richard and never seen again. Finally, Margaret Beaufort was the pious, formidable matriarch of the Tudor dynasty, the political family that brought some of England's most influential (and infamous) monarchs to the world stage. Through the lives of these powerful royal women, the machinations and politics of the Cousins' War, and the turmoil the conflict bought to the throne of England, are thoroughly explored.

David Baldwin and Michael Jones, Gregory's co-writers, had both previously written books about Elizabeth and Margaret, respectively, but at the time Gregory began researching Jacquetta their books had gone out of print. (If I remember a comment from Gregory's talk last year, the books are now being republished/reprinted.) This book is also the first time that Jaquetta's biography has been published. I'll talk about each biography briefly, and then the book as a whole.

The section on Jacquetta is the longest, which makes sense – if you want to learn about her, this is the only biography on the market! Unfortunately, while we know who Jacquetta married and the activities of her husband, very little remains in the historical record about her daily life or personality. Gregory has to rely on a lot of “maybe” and “possibly” in her reconstruction of the duchess' life. Since she's a novelist who normally writes fiction, I think Gregory pulls this off more successfully than other writers, but the story is definitely slanted in a way to support the character who ended up in Lady of the Rivers.

David Baldwin tackles Elizabeth Woodville, and he does pretty well. I haven't read his full-length biography, but the shortened essay here makes me want to! He has a very academic style, somewhat dry, but I enjoyed it all the same.

Michael Jones had a more accessible writing style, and he was clearly sympathetic to Margaret Beaufort. I actually liked this biography the best out of the three, because it strikes the best balance between supposition and historical records. It also helped me understand Margaret Beaufort and appreciate her role in history – in The Red Queen she was downright unbearable.

However, the part of the book I liked best was the introduction. It's a fascinating peek into the research and writing philosophy of Philippa Gregory – something I've often wondered about as I've made my way through her oeuvre. She also talks about the role of women throughout history, and how the 20th century feminist movement has allowed scholars to finally 'seriously' research these women and bring their roles to light for the first time in centuries.

This makes a great companion to the Cousins' War trilogy, if you've been keeping up with it. It's also a fine read on its own, but if you're reading the book without the series as a reference point, the selection of women included here seems a bit random at best.

4 out of 5 stars


To read more about The Women of the Cousins' War, buy it or add it to your wishlist click here.

No updates for the next several days, folks!  This weekend, my fiance and I are heading up to Yosemite for a pre-wedding seminar.  (The wedding itself isn't until May, but the valley chapel requires anyone using the local pastor to attend a one-day class on successful marriages.)  After that, one of my oldest friends will be getting hitched, and I'll be helping out as one of her bridesmaids.  All in all, things will be very hectic!!


Posts will resume on Saturday, March 10th.