Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Books

I finally finished Son of A Witch! It took me forever to finish this book. I found the pacing so slow. Maybe that's because I didn't know where Liir's story was going to take him, unlike Wicked, where we knew Elphaba's fate from the first page.

SoAW ended abruptly, and it left me with a lot of questions. How did Shell become Emperor? Where is Nor? What happened to her after she left Southstairs? And Candle, where did she go? Why did she decide to leave? For that matter, what about Trism? And what did Liir name the baby? I wish that there had been a epilogue.

Anyway, that's over now, and I've decided to take a short break from Gregory Maquire. The book on my nightstand now is Heroines, written by Eileen Favorite. Here's the rundown from the official website:

Watergate is breaking news, but at the Prairie Homestead, a boarding house in Illinois, there are more immediate concerns. A distraught Emma Bovary has arrived unannounced, and Anne-Marie and her daughter Penny have wrenched themselves from television coverage to attend to their new guest.

But if there's one rule at the Prairie Bluff Homestead, it's never meddle in the lives of the Heroines, however cruel the destinies to which they are bound. There's nothing to be done for poor Emma, save for the provision of tea and a sympathetic ear.

Adolescent angst can't compete with beautiful and grief-stricken, and Penny, a moody thirteen, knows she's no competition against such ethereal creatures as Blanche DuBois and Scarlett O'Hara. Hurt and excluded, she strikes out one night across the prairie to cool her hot head.

But when she arrives at the forbidden woods, she's in no mood to obey her mother's second rule, never to enter--and she soon finds herself in a world of very real heroes and villains, an unwilling heroine in her own terrifying story.

I could not resist a book in which classic figures from literature come together. I have been dreaming of a book like this to come along. It's my geek dream come true! It's so meta, like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, except in novel form.

Seriously, I think I have a problem. I just keep thinking that I need books to read by the pool this summer, because magazines get sweaty and messy. I found that out the hard way last summer with Vogue.

Once I'm done with Heroines, I'll make a short visit back to Maguire with Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, another "fractured fairytale", this time retelling the story of Cinderella. What I'm really looking forward to, though, is getting to read Bull's Island, by my favorite author, Dorothea Benton Frank, who sets most of her novels in the Low Country of South Carolina.

What are y'all going to read this summer?

Toodles!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I think you will enjoy Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. I am going to read the 4th book in the Twilight series this summer, and lots of beach trash, and a stack of other books sitting on my shelf. I love summer reading!

Josie Thames said...

Ha, ha--one of my favorite things about summer is beach trash! It's when I catch up on my Chick Lit!