Funny Girl

Yes Please by Amy Poehler
2014
Reviewed by Diane K. M.
My rating: 2.5 stars rounded up to 3


I am probably not the only one who has a girl crush on Amy Poehler. She's funny, she's smart, she's sassy and she does good work. 

But I hope my future best friend will forgive me when I say her book is less than great. "Yes Please" is a fun little memoir about Amy's childhood, how she got her start in comedy, and some good behind-the-scenes stories, but overall, it's scattered and not very deep. She briefly discusses her marriage and divorce to actor Will Arnett, but the focus is primarily on her career. My favorite chapters were about her years at "Saturday Night Live" and "Parks and Recreation," which is a favorite show of mine.

Early on, Amy discusses how difficult it was to write a book, and that she had to work on it when she had a few spare moments between jobs and taking care of her two children. It definitely felt like it was worked on it bits and pieces; it was not cohesive and some of the chapters even felt like filler. 

I listened to this on audio, performed by Amy Poehler and several of her entertainment friends, including Seth Meyers, Carol Burnett, Mike Schur, Kathleen Turner, Patrick Stewart, and also some cameos by Amy's parents. I think I liked the book more on audio than I would have in print (similar to when I listened to Tina Fey perform her book "Bossypants," which was much more enjoyable than reading it). There were a few good quotes about friendship and show business and trusting yourself, and if I ever get a print copy from the library, I will revise this review and add those lines.

I think I would only recommend this book to serious Amy Poehler fans; some celebrity memoirs have deeper themes and can resonate with a wider audience, but I don't think this is one of those books. (Sorry, Amy. Can we still be BFFs?)

Prisoner 489

Prisoner 489 by Joe R. Lansdale
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Bernard, Wilson, and Toggle work at a prison graveyard on an island near an island prison. When Prisoner 489 is executed, they use the electric chair on him four times and put a plastic bag over his dead. But when he gets to the island for burial, he's not quite dead and in a foul mood...

I contributed money to the Kickstarter for this Dark Regions Novella by Joe Lansdale. I was not disappointed.

Prisoner 489 is the story of three men battling something that can't die. That's pretty much all I'm going to divulge of the plot. Imagine being trapped on an island with an unstoppable monster and you've got a pretty good idea of what sort of novel this is.

In just a few pages, Lansdale manages to establish the three workers who live on the island, Kettle, the man who brings them their supplies once a week, and Prisoner 489, who is more of a force of nature than a character.

Lansdale's writing is top notch but it took me a few pages to get into the story. Once the prisoner shows up, the story goes into high gear and the pages won't turn fast enough. As always, the story is told in Joe Lansdale's front porch style, making it an easy but compelling read.

The illustrations by Santiago Caruso add a lot to the story and I can't wait to see the finished product.

If you're looking for a horror novella to read this holiday season, Prisoner 489 will meet your needs, right up until he tears your leg off and beats you to death with it. 4 out of 5 stars.

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The Milkman

The Milkman: A Freeworld Novel by Michael J. Martineck
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When someone frames Emory Leveski for murder, his life goes down the toilet. McCallum, the detective assigned to the case, doesn't think Emory did it but doesn't have the budget to save him. But what does all that have to do with Sylvia Cho and her documentary about The Milkman, a rogue scientist who posts about milk quality all over the world?

This is one of those books I'm having a hard time formulating an opinion on.

First of all, I love the world The Milkman is set in. Imagine a world where the governments go into debt and are bought out by three corporations. Crimes are given an investigation budget based on the victim's earning potential for the company. Anything beyond that isn't cost effective. Everyone wears wristphones connecting them to the internet. Now that I type it, the world doesn't seem all that unfamiliar...

Ed McCallum is a cop who'd rather be an artist, investigating a crime he suspects is a setup from the start. Emory Leveski, one of the people responsible for the Milkman's reports, finds himself framed for murder. Sylvia Cho has her boss try to strong arm her into getting an abortion so she can work on the documentary. All the ingredients are pretty fresh.

So why can't I give this book a glowing review? Because I didn't think the ingredients were put together in a compelling fashion. The cases were almost completely unrelated until the end. Also, the shifting points of view were so frequent that the only character I really got attached to was McCallum, and that's likely because detective fiction is my bread and butter. Also, did I really need to know the prison rapists used a screwdriver handle coated in butter to lube up Emory's asshole before they went to town on him? No, I think not.

Still, it was a better than average read. Martineck did a good job at doing the world-building without making me feel like I was reading an encyclopedia. The murder victim seemed like an afterthought in the proceedings, though.

All things considered, I liked The Milkman more than I disliked it and I hope Michael Martineck revisits this dystopian corporate world. Three out of Five stars.

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Benjamin Black Attempts a Homage to Raymond Chandler

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Three out of five stars

As a general rule, I avoid reading books in which a new author takes over an established character from another author who has died or retired. The whole idea of taking over someone else's series seems somehow wrong to me on a number of levels, and I've never read one yet in which I thought that the new author really did justice to the series or the characters.

Given that, I would have totally ignored this book in which Benjamin Black resurrects Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe who is, of course, one of the icons of crime fiction. But then a book club to which I belong chose the book and I had no choice in the matter.

I really wish they hadn't. I've read a couple of Black's novels featuring his own series character, Quirke, a pathologist in the 1950's Dublin morgue, and I've enjoyed them. Even so, I approached this book with more than a little trepidation, and reading it did nothing to allay the concerns I had going in.

The book is set in the early 1950s and opens with Marlowe sitting in his office. A beautiful, leggy and mysterious black-eyed blonde wanders in and asks Marlowe to find a missing "friend," named Nico Peterson. The blonde is a little vague about the details of her relationship with the missing Nico and about why she is so anxious to find him.

Marlowe and the reader both know that the woman is not giving him the whole story, but of course that's the way things go in P.I. novels like this. Marlowe takes the case, which naturally takes any number of strange twists and turns before finally coming to a conclusion. Black attempts to imitate Chandler's style, but succeeds only marginally. The fact of the matter is that there was only one Raymond Chandler and in the seventy-five years since Philip Marlowe first appeared in The Big Sleep, no one's come close to matching what Chandler did.

If I'd picked up this book knowing nothing about it, and if the main character had been named something other than Philip Marlowe, I would have thought that someone had made yet another fairly game effort to imitate Chandler but had fallen short like everyone else who has attempted to do so. And before writing this review, I sat down and re-read The Big Sleep, which I reviewed here in March, 2010. Doing so simply confirmed my impression that this homage pales against the original.

The Black-Eyed Blonde is not a bad book, and, for what it's worth, it's better than Poodle Springs, the novel that Chandler left unfinished and which was then completed by Robert B. Parker. But it's not nearly as good as a Philip Marlowe novel by Raymond Chandler and, for that matter, it's not as good as a Quirke novel by Benjamin Black. I'll eagerly look forward to reading another of the latter, but when it comes to Philip Marlowe, I'll be sticking to the real thing.

Needs More Scenery

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



That's what I felt I was seeing as I read this, a blank slate, a void, an empty room.

A Wrinkle in Time is a very nice tale, but I just wish L'Engle spent more time developing the settings. The decently rounded characters seemed to be floating in spartan landscapes like portraits hung in limbo.

Lackluster description is one thing, but perhaps more than anything, I think my tepid-3 star, ho-hum reaction to A Wrinkle in Time is due to my reading it as a middle-aged curmudgeon. It's made for kids and I haven't been one of them in a while.

My wife loved this book as a child and kept hinting I should read it, hinting so much that the hints became ultimatums. Could've sworn I heard her in my head shouting, "Read this or you do not love me!" So I read it and well...meh. I missed the age-appropriate boat on that one, I guess. But hey, at least I was smart enough not to give her my scathing review (yes, this would've been seen as a scathing review in her eyes). I just said, "It was nice," and that's the story of how I managed to stay married.

The End

Blowing Forester's Horn

Lieutenant Hornblower by C.S. Forester
Reviewed by Jason Koivu
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Get your horn blown in this book of complete seaman insanity!

Our hero Horatio Hornblower is put in a tough position with his wardroom messmates. The captain of the HMS Renown has gone off his rocker and thinks his officers are plotting against him. They're not...well, not at first. They're pushed into it when things come to a head and it becomes apparent the captain's erratic behavior is endangering the ship. The lieutenants gather for a meeting to talk over the situation in a meeting that could be construed as mutinous. And that's when things take a surprising twist.

Lieutenant Hornblower is a different kind of Hornblower book in that its narrated by Bush, Hornblower's bestbud. This shift in the usual POV was probably done for a couple reasons. One, Bush leads a pivotal attack and two, Hornblower is caught in a tough situation affecting his financial and married life, which would be easier to show through someone else's eyes rather than hearing it from the source. An Englishman of that period (early 1800s) would never be so indelicate as to discuss such intimate details.

While this is the second book in the series, it's actually the seventh book Forester wrote about Hornblower's career in the navy. The series originally started with Hornblower having already obtained the rank of captain. After Forester took the series to its natural resolution, he went back and did a bunch of prequels to fill in the details of his hero's early days.

I bring this up only because the writing is affected by it. This book is more nuanced than those preceding it. Forester's plotting and character development improved as he went along. The first half of the series flows and feels old-shoe comfortable, while the latter half feels stilted and utilitarian. The whole thing, especially this book, is quite enjoyable, so that's just a minimal word-to-the-wise.

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Finder

Emma Bull
Tor Books
Reviewed by Nancy
5 out of 5 stars

Summary

An explosive urban fantasy thriller from the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Award-nominated author of Bone Dance and War for the Oaks. Bull returns to fantasy for her hardcover debut--a tale of magic and murder in the streets and back alleys of a human city on the edge of Fairie.

My Review

Bordertown is a city between the Human and Fae worlds. While elven magic does not work in the human world and technology does not work in the Elflands, both work in Bordertown inconsistently and with interesting effects. Humans, elves, and halflings, troubled folks who are running away from their pasts, or have trouble fitting in anywhere else, inhabit the city of Bordertown.

Orient is a human with the special ability to find missing things and people. His best friend is Tick-Tick, a highborn elf estranged from her family, and ace mechanic. Detective Sunny Rico enlists Orient’s help to find a killer, which leads them to a dangerous drug purported to change humans into elves. Meanwhile, a mysterious illness is endangering the elven population.

I read this book for the first time in 1995. Though I have forgotten a lot of details over the years, I remember how it broke my heart. Little did I know that just six months later, I would suffer the same fate as Orient.

Reading this book a second time brought back a lot of painful and wonderful memories of my close friend and made me all weepy. This story is riveting, fast-paced, magical, and heartbreaking.

Not only is this a satisfying mystery and Borderlands a rich and vibrant city, it is a thoughtful and moving exploration of friendship, family, loss, grief, coming to terms with one’s past, and going forward. It broke me and stitched me back together.

Warmly recommended to anyone who enjoys deeply character-driven, devastating, and hopeful urban fantasy.

THE BOOKMAN BY LAVIE TIDHAR

The Bookman by Lavie Tidhar
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

”Everywhere he looked there were books.

They rose into the air in majestic columns, stacks and stacks of them forming a maze that seemed to stretch to forever; the stacks rose high into the air and disappeared towards the unseen ceiling. The air had the overwhelming smell of old books, of polished leather and yellowing leaves, like the smell of a bookshop or a public library magnified a thousand-fold.”



Orphan is a poet, not just a poet in desire, but actually a published poet. He is in love with a young woman named Lucy.

”I travelled among unknown men,
In lands beyond the sea;
Nor, England! did I know till then
What love I bore to thee.
--William Wordsworth, ‘Lucy’”

One of his good friends is Tom Thumb, not exactly the Thumb from fairy tale legends, but more of roguish womanizer who has decided opinions about poets.

’Bleedin’ poets,’ Tom Thumb muttered as he exchanged his pyjamas for a crumpled suit. ‘Always bleating of love and flowers and sheep grazing in fields. The only sheep I like are the ones resting on a spit.’

Orphan’s world is one of human, or machine, or lizardine. Though few in number the lizards are the rulers of this alternative Earth. They are intent on sending a probe to Mars, but as the plot thickens it becomes less apparent exactly what their intentions are with the launch. Lord Byron is a machine, a very realistic version built by men that existed before. He is intent on getting equal rights for machines and for some bloody reason he thinks Orphan can help him with that.


The Turk a machine that might be an oracle or maybe just a riddler.

When Lucy is a victim of a terrorist attack, a book that was a bomb or a bomb that was a book, Orphan is intent on doing everything he can to bring her back.

Dead it seems is never really quite dead. The very entity that blew her up proves to be the means by which she can be resurrected.

He is THE BOOKMAN.

”A monstrous being made of the yellowing pages of thousands of books, with a face like bleached vellum and gilt-edged eyes, who stalked him through a maze of bookshelves where no light penetrated.”

He has an agenda as well and like Lord Byron believes Orphan is the means to achieve his aims.

”We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”--Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan.



Now Lavie Tidhar infuses this novel with a whole host of famous real and fictional people. Karl Marx makes an appearance along with Isabella Beeton. Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes have small roles as do Harry Flashman, Henry Irving, Captain Nemo, Watson, and Irene Adler. Moriarty, yes that man, is the Prime Minister. Jules Verne proves to be a much needed ally for Orphan as he places the flying version of the Nautilus at his disposal. It seems there is an island, a disappearing/reappearing Caliban’s Island that holds the key to the puzzle. Quotes and allusions to Shakespeare are rampant throughout the text.


Irene Adler played by Gayle Hunnicutt.

This novel is an ode to all that Tidhar obviously loves about Victorian history, about books, and about the meshing of science and fiction. I’ve made several attempts to read and enjoy steampunk fiction, but this is the first time I can truly say I loved the ride from beginning to end. Almost every chapter ends with a cliffhanger which to me was a nod to what has surely been a long love affair by the author with pulp fiction. The steampunk is blended so nicely into the story with airships, mechanical birds that eat; and well, poop, and a simulacrum that was magically produced from Orphan’s thumb that it never proved a distraction from the page turning plot.

As humans begin to decide the future; as machines see a destabilized government as an opportunity; as the lizards may just want to go home, the power behind it all, much like the world we live in now has a council of war.

”The fate of the city, Orphan thought, would be decided here, over port and cigars, at the end of the meal. Was this how revolutions started? Or was that how they end?”

Did I mention there is a Binder? For there to be a Bookman there must also be a Binder. In this case he is a spider who may be able to reconstruct what the Bookman destroys.

Orphan must survive the alleyways of London and the shark and pirate infested waters of his ongoing quest. He will be pulled and prodded from all directions as the power players with their different agendas discover that he may be the means to the end or a new beginning. Orphan becomes everyone’s pawn as he tries to find the right leverage to achieve his goal of returning Lucy to his loving arms.


If Jules Verne or H.G. Wells were being first published today they would be considered Steampunk.

Tidhar shares his love of books, of ideas, of unfettered imagination to remind us all of why we not only began reading, but why we keep reading. An absolute delight to read.



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Revival

Revival by Stephen King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When Jamie Morton first encounters the Reverend Charles Daniel Jacobs, he is six years old. Jacobs cures his brother's muteness, only to leave town a broken man when his wife and son are killed. Jamie and the Rev will cross paths again and again as the Rev seeks to master what he calls the secret electricity, the energy that powers the universe...

I found this book to be an extremely mixed bag, which you'll read in a moment.

Revival follows the life of Jamie Morton, a rhythm guitarist, whose life intersects with Charles Jacobs, a priest/huckster/mad scientist who things electricity is the key to most of life's mysteries. I'm going to keep this as spoiler-free as possible.

Since Stephen King produces best sellers more often than I wash my car, I tend to forget what a great writer he is. I think if he didn't love scaring the piss out of people, he probably would have been a literary writer of some renown. The characters he creates in this seem very real, with an exception I'll cover in a minute. The picture he paints of Jamie Morton's life is very well written, warts and all.

While I enjoyed reading the book due to the Kingliness of the writing, it wasn't all that exciting. I was interested in Jamie's journey from rock and roller to drug addict to studio musician but the meat of the story was whenever he crossed paths with Charles Jacobs, or whatever he was calling himself at the time. Structurally, it reminded me of The Shining. There was a long buildup with just enough teasing to keep me interested. If it wasn't for the ending, I probably would have given this a two.

The other thing that didn't quite sit right is that Jacobs evolved from being one cartoonish stereotype to another, from devout priest to carny to evangelist to scene-chewing villain. He's the one character I never really believed in. Also, what's with Stephen King's recent obsession with carnies? Doctor Sleep and Joyland both featured them and now this one.

All that being said, I was entertained by Revival but not enthralled by it. I LOVED the glimpse of the afterlife at the end. "That is not dead which can eternal lie" indeed. Also, the King Easter eggs were also cool.

I didn't love it but it's definitely better than Joyland, Doctor Sleep, and Mr. Mercedes. We'll call it 3.5 out of 5.

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Introducing Charlie Hood

Reviewed by James L. Thane
Five out of five stars

In this excellent introduction to his Charlie Hood series, T. Jefferson Parker creates two very memorable and intriguing characters. The first is the protagonist, Charlie Hood, a veteran of the war in Iraq who is now an L.A. County Sheriff's deputy. The second is Allison Murrieta, who claims to directly descended from the famous California outlaw, Joaquin Murrieta, who was shot and beheaded in 1853. The original Murrieta was famous, or infamous, enough that his head was preserved in a jar of alcohol and sent on tour.

No one knows exactly what might have become of this gruesome token; some say it was lost in the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, but Allison claims to have it hidden in her barn, along with some other keepsakes of Joaquin's. More important, Allison has now picked up Joaquin's mantle, and in a wig and mask has set out on a crime spree that involves boosting cars (Allison is a real gearhead) and robbing fast food joints.

Allison donates a fair share of her proceeds to various local charities, including one run by the L.A.P.D. The cops are not amused, but in this media-besotted age, Allison becomes a folk hero and a local celebrity. Then she tumbles to a score in which a local diamond dealer is planning to pay off a loan to some gangsters with $450,000 worth of diamonds. The street value would be around forty-five grand and so Allison sets up to take off the dealer. But she arrives late to the scene and finds ten men dead in the building where the exchange was to be made.

She also finds the diamonds, gathers them up and is screaming away from the scene in a yellow Corvette Z06-505, when Deputy Charlie Hood pulls her over. By now, Allison has ditched her disguise and the diamonds are out of sight. Hood demands to see her license which reveals Allison to be Suzanne Jones, a mild-mannered eighth-grade history teacher. Suzanne comes up clean on the computer and claims to have been in the area visiting a relative and so Hood lets her go. But as he does, a very bad man named Luperico, who is also looking for the diamonds, drives by and gets a very good look at Allison/Suzanne.

And with that, the story is off and running. Suzanne is drop-dead gorgeous, very smart and a woman who's not about to let anyone stand in the way of what she wants. Hood is smitten immediately, and the attraction is mutual. But when Hood discovers the ten bodies almost immediately after he lets Suzanne go on her way, he can't help but wonder if she might have been involved in the shoot-out.

Because he discovered the bodies, Hood is temporarily promoted to the Homicide team that is investigating the killings and he and Suzanne begin a delicate dance as Hood becomes increasingly suspicious and begins to put two and two together. In the meantime, Luperico is hot on Suzanne's trail and seems to be almost clairvoyant in knowing where she's going to be at any given time. He's determined not to stop until he recovers the diamonds, no matter how much blood might be shed along the way.

All in all, it's a great ride. T. Jefferson Parker has written any number of outstanding books and this perhaps his best since Silent Joe, which was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best Novel. It's fast-paced, deftly plotted, both funny and bittersweet, and populated with a great cast of characters. It's a winner all the way around.