A Gaggle of Book Reviews

Melanie Wells was gracious enough to allow me to interview her about her writing and her newly released book, My Soul to Keep. You can read the (spoiler-free!) review here.

1. You and Dylan share some biographical information, including the study of psychology, theology, and teaching. How much of Dylan’s personality mirrors your own?
   

   Dylan has my voice and some of my background, but that’s about it. She’s my soapbox and shares my point of view on people – that they’re flawed and mostly doing the best they can. But I do not share her obsession with Pine Sol. I have many close friends and am a good girlfriend (I hope), whereas she’s a relational disaster zone. I hope I’m not as self-absorbed as she is. If I am, someone should send me to time out.

2. Dylan has some very spiritual/religious experiences, as do the very special children in My Soul to Keep, but the experiences are not tied to one particular religion. What was your rationale behind that choice?
   

   I don’t really know much about religion, to tell you the truth. I wasn’t raised in a church-going environment and have never been part of a denomination. My entire experience with God has been from a non-denominational perspective and from studying the Bible directly. I think there’s a lot out there that we can’t explain. I get emails from all over the world about baffling spiritual events. And they don’t tend to fit into tidy categories. Not much of life does, I’ve noticed.

3. Have you had any personal experiences with spiritual guides? If not, how did you decide to integrate them into the story?
   

   I have the radar, certainly. Some people have it and some don’t. I just discussed this in a blog I share with my best friend, Trish Murphy (www.ifeelawakelouise.blogspot.com). There are times when I feel something evil is lurking about and there are times when I feel a level of protection that can only be supernatural. Many times, I’ve almost done something…. Stepped off a curb, for example… and had a strange sense of doubt that caused me to stop. And then a truck would speed around the corner which would have flattened me if I’d been walking across the street. Things like that. But that’s about as specific as it gets. Interesting story, though. In My Soul to Keep, the character Joe Riley was actually a friend of a friend. The original Joe Riley died of AIDS years ago, and since then, my friend has continued to feel a strong spiritual connection to him and has had experiences similar to the one I just described with the curb and the truck. So I named the angel after him.

4. “My Soul to Keep” focuses on a child’s kidnapping. You clearly did a lot of research about the facts of kidnapping. How did you decide how to write the emotional effects?
   

   That was tough. I have friends on the homicide squad at the Dallas Police Department. Kidnappings, strangely enough, are handled in Robbery. One of my homicide buddies once worked Robbery, so had worked some kidnappings. But they were all drug-related, where the kids were returned within a day or two for drug money. I thought about trying to talk to the parent of a kidnapped child – there have been several high profile stories in the DFW area in recent years. But I just couldn’t bring myself to disrupt their lives. So I opted to keep it soft. I didn’t want the emotional aspect of the story to be too wrenching since the topic is such a sensitive one. That’s why Maria reacts the way she does. She’s a tough girl – especially when you know how Nicholas was conceived. I figured it fit her character to square her shoulders and get down to the business of surviving this terrible thing and finding her son. I’ve gotten some criticism about that, but I’m standing by that decision. I think it was the right way to go.

5. As a parent, I had a very hard time beginning “My Soul to Keep”, though I had an equally difficult time putting it down. Are there different risks in writing a book about a kidnapping than a mystery involving another crime?
   

   Sure – but I think that would apply to any terrible crime, honestly. I have two friends whose mothers were murdered – violently. (There’s an entry about this on the Thelma & Louise blog I mentioned earlier). Neither of them, quite understandably, finds murder entertaining. Especially when the violence is shown. I try to keep my books free of gratuitous violence and suffering. You never see it happening – you only hear about it in hindsight. If you’ll notice, you don’t find out what happened to Nicholas until the end. And even then, I just couldn’t bring myself to write about any of the horrible things that do happen to children out there. It’s a terrible world, really, when you think about these things. I don’t know how God stands it.

6. It took me quite a bit of the book to get a handle on Peter Terry, whom other readers would remember from your earlier books. How would you describe him to a new reader?
   

   Peter Terry is a metaphor, really. As a character in the books, he’s a demonic, other-worldly figure. But he’s not like the Frank Peretti demons or any of the stereotypical things you read about. He’s more insidious than that. He’s more of a mental and spiritual stalker. Not unlike the people and events and obstacles we all have in our lives. There’s a great book called “The Gift of Fear” which every woman should read. The idea is that fear is good. It’s a signal you should listen to. When you feel it, something is wrong. Listen to yourself and do what you need to do. Run, scream, fight – whatever. This is one of the messages of my books. Listen to your fear and never go down without a fight.

   [ed. note - I completely agree - if you haven't read The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker, go buy it. Now.]

7. Dylan, Liz, and Maria are very strong women who pull together support each other while their male companions are unavailable in different ways. Is the theme of women’s support for each other also in your other books? Have you found a similar support group?
   

   Dylan is pretty isolated in the earlier books. She really has no social life. In fact, at the end of The Soul Hunter, which is the second book in the series, she sort of “targets” Maria to be the first recruit in her campaign to have a social life. But the theme is important to me. I have a group of close girlfriends who are indispensable to me. We meet Wednesday nights – we’ve been doing this for almost 20 years, in one form or another – and share our lives. We named ourselves the Waah Waah Sisterhood, because we’ve had so much to cry about in that span of time. Also, I could not live without my closest friend, Trish Murphy. She’s a writer also, so she gets that whole thing, but we are just necessary for one another in life. We buddy-breathe through the entire thing.

8. Dylan has some OCD-type behaviors, about which she is very honest and amusing. How did you create such a realistic portrayal without going too far?
   

   That’s so fun to write about. There’s a scene in The Soul Hunter where Dylan cleans her water heater. Think about that. What a nut-job she can be! I think the key to the OCD thing is to make it funny and quirky. If she were agoraphobic, for example, or washed her hands or checked locks obsessively, that wouldn’t be funny. But she’s obsessed with order and germs in a messy, disorderly world. That’s what we call a fat pitch – fun to swing at and you can hit it out of the park.

9. Authors with books in a series have to walk a line between giving enough information to new readers and alienating their existing fan base with too much back story. How do you decide what to include and exclude?
   

   That was tough. I wanted each book to be a stand-alone read, but when you get to the end, you realize it’s one long story. So as a writer, you have to be careful, obviously, about what you do and don’t give away. You need to set up the characters without over-explaining in the later books. And you have to be careful about giving away the big fat answers – the identity of the murderer in The Soul Hunter, for example, was very hard to keep out of My Soul to Keep. I lost a little sleep over that. And took a lot of Excedrin. I should invest in whatever company makes that stuff. I keep them in business.

Thank you Melanie! Mystery lovers, go pick up a copy of My Soul to Keep, you won’t regret it.

The Duck Who Played the Kazoo is the newest children’s picture book by Amy E. Sklansky, illustrated by Tiphanie Beeke. Amy’s catchy poetry combined with the beautiful watercolors by Tiphanie make a book that is appealing to children and also fun for the designated reader. It isn’t always easy to find picture books that enchant children which adults will enjoy as well, but Amy and Tiphanie have created such a book in The Duck Who Played the Kazoo.

The poetry in The Duck Who Played the Kazoo has a meter and rhyme that is fun to read; the poems also include zu zu, words that manage to evoke the sound of a kazoo! When we first meet Duck, he is alone in a quiet lake:

There once was a duck
who loved the kazoo
He played:

La ditty, da ditty
zu zu.

While the white duck loves his peaceful lake, he becomes lonely, and packs up to find some other ducks. He lands near a river, and watches a group of brown ducks play in the water. My daughters (9, 7, 4) thought that it would be difficult for Duck to find new friends at the river, but after he plays his kazoo, they are quick to welcome him:

“Hooray!” they all shouted
when his tune was through
“Would you like to swim
with our fine feathered crew?”
“You bet,
Let’s get wet!”
Zu zu.

The pages become brighter and more colorful as The Duck Who Played the Kazoo enjoys being with his friends. The repeating zu zu in the poetry is both reassuring and fun, a sign that the duck is content and the story is continuing.

The evocative words and the gorgeous watercolors bring Duck’s story to life. My daughters all gave the story a thumbs up, and we needed to read it several times. Unlike many rhyming books for children, The Duck Who Played the Kazoo continued to be enchanting even after the 5th reading in two days! We highly recommend The Duck Who Played the Kazoo; it’s a great mix of language play, accessible poetry, and a fun storyline for kids and adults. My only complaint was listening to the effusive kazoo playing by my daughters in the days after we read the book!

Once you’ve had a taste of the poetry in The Duck Who Played the Kazoo, you’ll want to check out Amy’s other books, and more books with Tiphanie Beek’s illustrations.

This book was received from the publisher for review

The wonderful novel Happy Hour at Casa Dracula has been re-released as a mass market paperback after its original release in trade paperback. I mentioned this book in a previous post about great vampire romances, and relished the idea of the story being available to a larger audience. Of course, I also relished the idea of re-reading Marta Acosta’s bon mots within Happy Hour at Casa Dracula! If you know how Happy Hour ends, you will spot Marta’s clues throughout the book – it qualifies as a top re-read – definitely a novel to be read more than once.

Happy Hour at Casa Dracula could be put into many categories – Latina literature, vampire novel, vampire romance, paranormal mystery, and so many others. Marta Acosta does a wonderful job of introducing her audience to a new type of vampire and a new heroine – one with natural curves and a cooking style that includes “putting things in tortillas”. the vampire fantasy genre tends to be overrun with very Caucasian individuals, with very few “people of hue”. It’s wonderful to see Happy Hour at Casa Dracula and the rest of the series bucking that trend.

Milagro de los Santos, Mil to her friends, is a graduate of Fancy University, but hasn’t quite found her niche. She lives in a basement apartment, has a small gardening business, a “reading consultant” business for wealthy women who want to look well read, and writes novels and short stories she hasn’t been able to get published. When Mil attends a party held by one of her reading consultant clients, her ex-boyfriend from F.U. is there as the fêted author. As she leaves the party, she meets a handsome man and ends up kissing him, and falling down, so they exchange blood.

After the kiss, Mil’s world whirls out of control – she becomes very ill, and then she is hunted by one group of rabid extremists, and saved by another group. The kidnappers have money and political power behind them, the other group has money but is trying to remain secluded. Mil is thrown into a world of “genetically different” individuals who eat a lot of red foods and may drink blood – but they claim not to be vampires! Who should she trust? What about the handsome young men of the family – including the one with whom she shared a kiss? Happy Hour at Casa Dracula is a story of love, political machinations, and a woman’s search for her place in the world.
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Marta Acosta has create wonderful characters who are a lot of fun, characters with quirks and secrets that are exposed over time. No one is quite who they first appear, and as Mil finds herself, she is also discovering the true selves of those around her. It’s fabulous to read a book that takes on diversity in vampires, political machinations, and romance all at once. If you have never had the opportunity to check out a great vampire novel, Happy Hour is a good book to get you started – it isn’t cheesy, it is incredibly far from clichéd, and it has a great mix of suspense and fun.

Happy Hour at Casa Dracula is a truly unique book that I highly recommend. This is a book that you will devour, needing to see what happens next. But when you finish, you’ll re-read it, savoring the moments that have extra meaning after you’ve discovered the ending. When you’ve finished Happy Hour, you can pre-order the mass-market paperback of the sequel (Midnight Brunch at Casa Dracula), or if you’re impatient, pick up the trade paperback of Midnight Brunch. Then you just have to wait for the end of summer to read book 3 – The Bride of Casa Dracula!

While you’re waiting, be sure to check out Marta Acosta’s web site, as well as her Vampire Wire blog, which is filled with news and links to reviews of great paranormal/urban fantasy/vampire romance books.

This book was received from the publisher for review

The Final Warning: A Maximum Ride Novel is the much-anticipated fourth book in James Patterson’s young adult/tween Maximum Ride series. The series has attracted a large following as it puts the reader into the lives of a flock of six children who have been genetically designed to be 2% bird – they have wings and can fly! Before I launch into a review, NO – this is not going to be the final book. (That was my daughters’ concern when they heard the title.) I reviewed the first three books, and have been excited about this book for the past year. It’s hard for a book to live up to readers’ expectations, but James Patterson has written a fourth book that has no problems living up to the reader’s excitement and enthusiasm; I literally could not put it down, and finished it in one sitting! Keep reading for a sneak preview of Maximum Ride 4 – The Final Warning, without spoilers…

If you haven’t had a chance to read the first three books (or if you didn’t re-read them right before starting The Final Warning), Patterson does a great job of introducing you to the characters without overdoing the explanations. Max (as the narrator and the leader of the flock) catches us up on what the flock has been doing since the end of Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports. Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman, Angel, and Total (their talking dog) are planning to testify to Congress about what has happened as they tried to save the world from the School, the Institute, and Itex, the company which controlled everything. Once they have spoken with Congress, though, what will happen to them? Do they go to a new school, or is there another mission to save the world?

What will happen next? Well, the book includes a blog post from Fang that discusses that…

“The big news of today is that we’ve all decided to settle down and go to regular school and stuff, and Fox is going to make a reality TV series out of it, called Bird Kids in the House! They’ll have like a hundred cameras all over the lace and they can film Iggy cooking and Angel doing her weird stuff, and Total listening to his iPod.
They can film Max leading.
Nah, I’m just kidding. No reality series. Our lives are probably a little too real for most people, if you know what I’m saying. … We’re not sure what’s going to happen next.”

Of course, the the Voice in Max’s head leads the flock to find a new way to save the world after their defeat of Itex. Max and the gang might be tired of cold weather, in The Final Warning they learn that sometimes you have to suffer for a cause. The flock goes to Antarctica to study the effects of global warming, and the cuteness of penguins. Like any other 6 year old girl, Angel wants to adopt a baby penguin… This is a perfect example of the wonders of James Patterson’s writing; he has created 6 human-avian kids, and while they have extra strength, speed, and some special skills, they are still kids. Nudge chatters endlessly like a certain child in my house, Gazzy and Iggy conspire on practical jokes and explosions, and there’s the growing tension between Fang and Max who have grown up together, and now at 14 are experiencing attraction to each other.

While reading Maximum Ride series, readers are instantly transported into the world of the flock. Part of the reason the reader is sucked in so quickly is that the story is told in the first person, from Max’s perspective. Add in Fang’s blog and Patterson’s skill in creating characters and situations, and you have characters who feel incredibly real and that everyone will love. Patterson was brilliant in creating kids who can fly – who hasn’t wanted to fly? As soon as I started reading the series, I couldn’t read it fast enough. Now that I’m sharing the series with my kids (9, 7, 4), and they are begging for “just one more chapter” constantly. We’re torn between savoring these experiences we’re sharing with the flock and wanting to know what happens next!

If you are a reluctant reader, or you’re the parent of a reluctant reader, pick up the Maximum Ride series, and pre-order The Final Warning. It’s impossible to stop reading once you’ve started reading about Max and the flock. There’s a fine line for an author to walk when dealing with a “cause” – in The Final Warning Max, Fang, Iggy, Nudge, Gasman, and Angel are saving the world in a very different way than in the earlier books. This time they are trying to defeat the evil scientists, but also let the world know about global warming. Patterson does a great job of integrating characters, plot, excitement, and a cause in The Final Warning, and I hope it helps kids pay more attention to their world.

I highly recommend The Final Warning for any reader age 10+, and kids younger than that will enjoy The Final Warning and Maximum Ride series as a read-aloud book; the chapters are only a few pages each, which makes it very easy to cave in to the “just one more chapter!” request! Parents should be aware that there is quite a bit of violence, though the flock only acts in self-defense. If you’re an adult, don’t dismiss these out-of-hand as kid’s books. Just like some other young adult series, these are books that can be enjoyed by people of any age. In fact, The Final Warning and the earlier books are great books to read with your child and discuss together. If you like science or fantasy, flying kids or evil corporations, everyone will find something to love in The Final Warning!

Check out my review of the first three books as well. This book was received from the publisher for review

Beet is the newest novel by bestselling author Roger Rosenblatt. Beet is a (fictional) small, elite liberal arts college located about 40 minutes north of Boston. It and the small town with whom it shares a name were founded by a pig farmer, so the theme and mascot for both is a pig. Of course, the school mascot is named Latin the pig… The college’s endowment has gone missing, and the faculty is going back and forth between attacking each other and trying to find a set of courses that will save the college.

Professor Peace Porterfield is one of the professors you love to have – he’s excited about teaching, and loves helping students learn. When he is named to the committee who is supposed to save the college, he takes his new work just as seriously. Not everyone agrees with his desire to save the now-desititute Beet, so he and his committee become targets for radical students protesting the college, the head of the trustees who seems determined to close the college, as well as the president of Beet. Even Peace’s wife Livi is tired of living North of Boston, where her skills as a hand surgeon aren’t well utilized. So why is Peace Porterfield so determined to help Beet fly, when everyone else is determined to close the college, including its president?

Rosenblatt pulls us into the storyline quickly – anyone who attended a liberal arts college in the Northeast will identify with the situation and the quirky characters immediately. If you’ve lived in the area 40 minutes North of Boston, you’ll be glad to know that Rosenblatt mixes the fictional town and college of Beet with the real towns and colleges in the area. If you’ve ever read a book about the angst of college life, you’ll love the satire in this book – the protesters aren’t sure what they are protesting against, one of the most integral students is considering being a suicide bomber as he tries to major in Homeland Security, and the college administration really is as crooked as most people assume it to be.

In Beet, Rosenblatt’s writing is outstanding, causing me to laugh regularly (surprising the other passengers on the train). I’ve never read a book with so many quotes I needed to write down immediately…

• When Latin the pig is loose, “I don’t think he was going to devour you. In any case, it would have been the first time treyf ate a Jew.”
• One character has “hair the color of mixed nuts”
• Another has “a voice like dessicated fruit”
• A third looks like “an enlarged alter boy”
• The president’s “face had the folds of a Shar-pei”

While the satirical humor of Beet may not appeal to everyone, it should be on the “must read” list for anyone who graduated from a small college in the northeast and needs several smile and some guffaws. The plot and characters are well-developed, Rosenblatt walks the line between creating caricatures at whom he wishes to poke fun, and creating characters with depth that you can easily visualize.

I felt transported by Beet, back into the world I left 15 years ago when I graduated from college. It had that “inside joke” feel, but the reader was in on the joke, laughing. The mysterious loss of the endowment is a driving plot point, but it is the characters and the sharp writing that keep you turning page after page. I highly recommend picking up a copy of Beet – you won’t regret it!

This book was received from the publisher for review

Check out our interview with Melanie Wells, in addition to this review! 

My Soul to Keep (Dylan Foster Series #3) is the newest mystery and psychological thriller by Melanie Wells. Wells has previously written When the Day of Evil Comes and The Soul Hunter, both novels starring psychology professor Dylan Foster, who finds herself with appalling luck following her around. There are characters who are carried from one novel to the next, but no prior knowledge of the series is required for My Soul to Keep to quickly pull you into its thrall.

Melanie Wells and her protagonist Dylan foster share a background in both theology and psychology, and both live in the Dallas, TX area and have ties to Southern Methodist University. While there are similarities, there are also differences. Superficially, Wells has a dog, and Dylan has rabbits. But mostly, one hopes that Wells has never been involved in a real situation as haunting as the storyline in My Soul to Keep.

Before picking up My Soul to Keep, readers should be aware that this novel focuses on an investigation of a child’s abduction, as well as another child’s illness. When the book opens, Professor Dylan Foster is excited by the end of the academic year and her young friend Christine’s 6th birthday. As Dylan and her two friends are chatting, Christine and her friend Nicholas are playing at the park when Nicholas is kidnapped. It’s as if the earth tips off its axis at that point, as the next several days get stranger and stranger, and more and more fraught with anxiety. Melanie Wells’s writing is intense and vivid, painting word pictures of the characters as well as the life of the city of Dallas.

I have been noticing an increase in the number of books with angels or spiritual guides, and in this book Christine is known to be very open to the spiritual realm and has a guide named Earl who helps her. In fact, the searchers misunderstand Christine at first when she says the kidnapper is black – it is his heat and soul she is discussing, not his skin. When a police officer mentions Christine’s sensitivity as a “gift”, Dylan remarks to herself,

“I figured this would be an inappropriate time to mention that I’m sometimes cursed with the same gift, whch I would give back in an instant if I could locate the customer-service department.”

As days pass and Nicholas isn’t found, Christine herself becomes sick, and the tension rises. Wells writes children who act real – Christine may have a connection with the spirit realm, but she still freaks out about getting a chest x-ray! All of the characters act the way one would expect – no martyrs, and plenty of lost tempers.

The women in My Soul to Keep are very strong and supportive of eachother. In some ways their support is tied to unavailable male partners: Dylan is still emotionally tied to her ex-boyfriend David (who Christine insists is still her boyfriend, and that Dylan just needs to bake him snickerdoodles…); Christine’s father is on a missionary trip and unavailable to her mother Liz; Nicholas’s father is in jail, and his mother Maria’s boyfriend is a police officer, caught between supporting his girlfriend and his work. However, the support between the women would shine regardless of the situation.

In My Soul to Keep, Melanie Wells brought characters and the city of Dallas to life. I was transported back a dozen years to when we lived in Dallas – I felt as if I would run into Dylan and her friends at a playground or over enchiladas. I highly recommend meeting these characters and reading My Soul to Keep and the earlier novels by Melanie Wells (When the Day of Evil Comes and The Soul Hunter). I know I’ll be picking up the first two books and also awaiting the fourth book!  Don’t forget to read our interview with Melanie Wells, and pick up her books!

I was very impressed with the first two books in the Jaz Parks series by Jennifer Rardin, which I reviewed here. Jennifer has created a fascinating world in which others (such as weres and vampires) are known to exist, and in fact, some of them work for the government. Vayl is a 250 year old vampire working as an assassin for the CIA, and Jaz Parks is his Sensitive human partner. In Once Bitten, Twice Shy and Another One Bites the Dust, Jennifer set up the world and the characters, leaving us with an elite team of three assassins plus an accomplished seer and a incredibly talented inventor. In her third book, Biting the Bullet, she takes us several leaps forward with a book that has a dual focus on Jaz’s relationships and continuing their fight against paranormal terrorists.

You read “I couldn’t put it down” in a lot of book reviews, as well as, “I was on the edge of my seat”. Biting the Bullet is a book that will keep your stomach in knots, keep you on the edge of your seat, and quite possibly cause you to burn dinner because you can’t put it down. Jennifer Rardin’s third book in her Jaz Parks series not only lives up to the first two, in some ways it surpasses them. Now that the background information is out of the way, we can focus on the current mission to eliminate a terrorist in Iran known as “The Wizard”, as Jaz’s team works in conjunction with her twin brother David’s Special Ops team. Add in the tension between Jaz and David (he blames her for his wife’s death), plus the growing sexual tension between Jaz and Vayl, and Biting the Bullet doesn’t let you catch your breath.

Jennifer Rardin’s books include a religious perspective with quite a bit of discussion of Hell, Heaven, and angels, in addition to the expected mystical phenomenon. Jaz pushes herself to protect the souls of the people she loves, in addition to protecting their bodies. While there is a lot of discussion of necromancy and zombies in Biting the Bullet, we continue to see Jaz using dreams to discuss options with her angel adviser Raoul. Jaz and her twin’s late wife had a pact that they would each kill the other if they were turned into vampires to save their souls. As Jaz spends more and more time with Vayl, I wonder if she is rethinking her side of that pledge, and if we will learn more about vampires and souls…

Overriding the excitement and sexual tension is a firm patriotic belief that drives Jaz and her team in Biting the Bullet and the rest of the series. In a time when it isn’t always popular to be patriotic, they are drawn to doing what is right above all else. Regardless of your political views, eliminating terrorists with ties to fiends from Hell can be agreed to be a Good Thing! It is fascinating to see the story arc develop, as different members of the terrorist organization are targeted by Vayl and Jaz – we learn about the terrorist organization along with them, and are pulled along for the ride as they find supernatural solutions to evil. The depth of the characters and the series is displayed as we follow not only the dramatic tension, but also become invested in the relationships between characters, we care about their family members, and we wait anxiously for romantic developments.

Biting the Bullet is a very impressive book – whether you call it vampire fiction, urban fantasy, paranormal, military mystery, or any other label. Many authors have trouble keeping the reader’s interest after the first book, but there is no such problem here! I highly recommend all 3 books in the Jaz Parks series that have been published thus far, and have only one complaint – I have to wait until August for Bitten to Death (Jaz Parks, Book 4)?!

This book was received from the publisher for review