Gamelife; Mycroft Holmes

"Gamelife" by Micheal W. Clune wasn't quite what I was expecting. He played computer games as a kid and looks down on video games. Hey, I think Nintendo is awesome. So it wasn't really what I was expecting, and since he played games I've never even heard of, it wasn't all that interesting to me.

I've always been a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, and I always wondered, reading the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, what Mycroft's story was. Doyle has Holmes describe his older brother as being far more brilliant than he is, but refusing to put his talents to good use. I thought Kareem Abdul-Jabbar did a good job giving Mycroft an interesting backstory. This book takes place in the early 1870s, and Mycroft is still quite young. He's engaged to a lovely girl named Georgiana, who grew up on a sugar plantation in Trinidad. Mycroft hears of some troubling news from that area of the world: of young children dying, and when he tells Georgiana she immediately drops everything and takes off to go see what's going on. Mycroft and his friend Cyrus Douglas, who is also from Trinidad, follow her and uncover a rather ugly slavery ring. It was well written and very fascinating, I enjoyed it.

Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined; Rustication

Ten years since "Twilight" was first published! I can't believe it. Even though I didn't start reading them until 2007, it still doesn't seem like it was that long ago.
So for the tenth anniversary, instead of finishing "Midnight Sun" (it's okay, Stephenie, I forgive you), Stephenie Meyer decided to flip Twilight around a bit and published "Life and Death", in which the frail human is a boy named Beau and the vampire is a girl named Edythe. She contends that it works just as well with the gender switch, and while I don't totally agree, it was still a fun read. Beau is quite likeable and Edythe...well, she's Edythe. I wasn't expecting her to change *everyone's* genders (Jacob is now Julie, Esme is now Dr. Cullen, etc. The only ones who stayed the same were Charlie, Renee, and Phil), but hey, they're her characters and she can do what she likes.

I was expecting "Rustication" by Charles Palliser to be spookier than it was. Set in Victorian England, Richard is sent home from Cambridge, "rusticated", as it was called, for his behavior. Even though he doesn't come out and say it until 2/3 of the way through, it was easy to guess he was smoking opium. His good friend Edmund committed suicide with a letter Richard wrote him nearby, making it look like he might have had something to do with Edmund's death. So Richard joins his mother and older sister Effie in the house they had to move to after his father's death. It's a ramshackle affair, and they are so poor they can't even hire decent help.
Strange things are happening in the town: people are getting obscene letters threatening violence, then animals are being maimed. Richard suspects his sister is having an affair with the earl's nephew, who stands to inherit all his money, but when the nephew announces his engagement to another girl Effie is devastated. Richard threatens him at a Ball, and then the man turns up dead the next day. Richard manages to puzzle out that his mom and sister actually framed him for the letters, maimings, and murder to save his sister's reputation and manages to escape before the police can arrest him. I think Palliser wanted us to doubt Richard and think maybe he really *did* do it, but if that's what he wanted us to think it didn't really play out that way.

West Newport Blues; Fables Vol. 22; Yes, My Accent is Real

"West Newport Blues" by P.S. Foley is a love letter to time and place that doesn't exist anymore: Newport Beach in the 1970s. Scotty and Bobby are high school seniors, best friends who love to surf. Bobby is also a football star, Scotty prefers writing but he's popular just because he's Bobby's best friend. It was fun to read about how Newport used to be back then, and Foley captured the spirit of the place well, I think. I enjoyed the tale of teenage friendship, even if it seemed a little too sentimental to be realistic. It's a rare teen boy who is that self-aware.

And so ends "Fables" by Bill Willingham, after a dozen years and 150 issues. It was a great run and I enjoyed it. On the eve of their big battle, Rose Red meets with Snow White to discuss a treaty. Rose feels their family curse must be broken, after all, according to legend their family can only bear daughters and Snow White has sons with Bigby. They decide to never inhabit the same world and hope for the best, and send their armies home without bloodshed. It seems to have worked: there is a scene set many years in the future of their reunion after being apart for so long. It was a fitting ending to this series.

I'm a big fan of "The Big Bang Theory", and Kunal Nayyar, who plays Raj, seems like a nice guy. His autobiography was fun and sweet: growing up in India, coming to America to go to school and getting bit by the acting bug, deciding to pursue his dream and getting his big break by landing the job on "The Big Bang Theory". It was a fun, quick read.

All the Bright Places

"All the Bright Places" was written by the same Jennifer Niven who wrote "The Aqua Net Diaries", which I read years ago and enjoyed. I loved the heck out of "All the Bright Places", even though Finch struck me as unrealistic. Violet is mourning the death of her older sister, Eleanor, when she gets to know Theodore Finch, the school freak. Finch is larger than life (literally, Niven describes him as being tall and lanky with huge feet, he hit a growth spurt and just kept going), does crazy things, lives and loves hard, but also feels the dark times hard, too. I guessed he was bipolar right away. I did like him, and Violet, too, and it made me cry at the end even though I was determined not to. Why are all the best YA books the sad ones? At any rate, it was a really great book and I enjoyed it.

Dryland

I forgot about this one earlier, because honestly, it didn't leave that much of an impression on me. I didn't hate it. I didn't particularly love it. It was just sort of meh. Julie is a confused teen, living in Portland in 1992. Her older brother, Jordan, was a big time swim star who's now living overseas. Julie develops a fascination with a girl named Alexis, who talks her into joining the swim team. Julie isn't really any good at it, and she doesn't enjoy it, but she likes the attention from Alexis so she keeps at it. Sara Jaffe's voice is definitely great, she's got the teen thing nailed, especially in the early '90s, it felt very authentic. It just didn't do much for me.

Nightmares; Little Pretty Things; The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes

Yes, it's a children's book, but it was fun and well written. A quick read for sure. HIMYM's Jason Segel has teamed up with Kirsten Miller to write these books (there is at least one more). Charlie's mom passed away a few years earlier, and he's convinced his new stepmom is a witch. His family has had to move to her family's creepy ancestral mansion, and Charlie is having issues with insomnia and nightmares. He soon learns that his fear has opened a portal between the nightmare world and the waking world, and as a result nightmares are able to pass through to his side even when he's awake and torture him and his classmates. Charlie has to be brave and face his fears in order to close the portal and save his friends.

This is one of those books that made me sad to finish it, because it was really good, and it's one of those books no one will ever read. So I'm going to promote the heck out of it at work :) Juliet is stuck in the same small town she grew up in, in a dead end job cleaning rooms at a crappy motel. Once, she'd dreamed of escaping, of a bigger life, not living hand to mouth, but those dreams seem old and stale now. Then her old friend and rival from her high school track days, Maddy Bell, walks in the door at the motel. She wants to talk to Juliet, but Juliet feels snubbed by her expensive airs and dismisses her. She regrets it and vows to talk to her the next morning, but before she can, Maddy is found murdered. Now Juliet is determined to find out who killed her and why, and see if she can determine where her own life went so wrong. It was truly a page turner, I couldn't put it down. A great book that deserves more recognition.

Lawrence Block's latest, "The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes", kind of surprised me. Doak is a retired from the NYPD and living in Florida, occasionally doing private detective work. The local sheriff asks him to go undercover: he's gotten a report that the young wife of a wealthy local businessman has been asking around about how to knock off her husband. Doak poses as a hitman and tells the sheriff that Lisa has changed her mind and called it off. What really happened, though, is that Doak fell for Lisa, tipped her off, and the two of them conspire together to get rid of her husband and run away together. But now that Lisa is on the sheriff's radar, any accident that befalls her husband will throw suspicion directly on her, so Doak has to come up with an ingenious plan so they can get away with murder.