Shadow Hunter

 

By BR Kingsolver

When Erin was a preteen, she began to come into her magical powers and was adopted by the Illuminati and trained to be a Hunter, an assassin who uses both magic and martial arts to eliminate evildoers who are upsetting the balance. Or so she was told.

Turned out all that was a lie. She was actually eliminating road blocks to the Illuminati's plans for world domination. She found this out when she was sent to murder William Strickland. According to her master, Strickland was a sorcerer and practitioner of the Dark Arts and that he had created a superweapon that the Illuminati wanted. 

As Strickland lay dying from her attack, he told her the nature of the weapon, a small crystal ball: "It shows truth. Look through it when a man speaks, and it shows his lies. Look at a spell or a book or a work of art to see how true it is. Watch an Illuminati ritual and see the blood and the Darkness hidden beneath the surface."

He also warns Erin that of the crystal's other power: "Take that to your masters, and they will destroy it. But in the process, it will destroy them."

Erin takes the crystal and views Strickland through it. It shows her that he was dying. But she also saw: "...he was a wizard of the Light, and felt, though I couldn't tell how, that everything he had told me was the truth."

Leaving the dying man, Erin is confronted by his daughter:

'"He said you would come, and you would kill him."

"He may yet live," I said, "but he is dying."

"And you have the crystal?"

"Yes."

"Then you need this as well," she said holding out a book.

. . . The book was black leather trimmed in gold. The title, in the secret language of the Illuminati, said, "The History of the Illuminati."

"Read it," she said. "He said—my father said—that you must read it." She gave me a grin that was so malevolent I took a step back. "They will kill you when you take it to them, whether you read it or not. I hope you're stupid enough to believe their lies."'

Erin does read the book and discovers Strickland hadn't lied about the true nature of the Illuminati and what she had been doing for them: "Rather than being a force for the Light, I had advanced the reach of the Dark."

She takes the crystal to her master and leaves it in his hands, without the warning that Strickland gave her. True to what he said, crystal detonates and leaves the hidden city of the Illuminati vaporized with no trace left to show it had ever existed. The location where it had stood was now pristine wilderness.

Even though that was the end of the Illuminati stronghold, Erin knows the members are scattered all through the world in the places of influence and power and wealth. Her split from the group has put her life in danger and she goes into hiding, ending up in Westport, a city on the western coast of the USA. She quickly finds a job as a bartender and just as quickly discovers that Westport is a hive of magical activity and conflict between supernaturals like werewolves and vampires. Even the bar where she works is part of it, a haven for magically gifted people like herself, mages, wizards, shapeshifters, even vampires occasionally.

But that's not all she discovers. An Illuminati assassin, a Hunter, is in town and is behind a number of mysterious deaths among the supernatural communities. It appears the Illuminati are up to their usual tricks, fomenting disorder in order to gain some kind of advantage in Westport and increase their influence. Erin finds herself entangled in this conflict and trying to help her newfound friends and community survive the Illuminati machinations and still keep her presence hidden from the Hunter and his Illuminati cohorts.

This was an OK read. It goes from Erin learning how to pretend to be an ordinary person to battles with supernaturals that show she certainly is not a ordinary person. Which quickly becomes apparent to those around her and raises many questions about her past that she, for her own safety, will not share.

There are so many supernatural battle scenes, which are just like all battle scenes, just with magic thrown in. To me, no more interesting than all fictional battle scenes, boring. So, bartend for a bit, meet some folks for a bit, battle. Repeat over and over again. 

Normally, I would classify this as a book that would appeal mostly to female readers. But the battle after battle scenes reads more like a book for male readers, who are more inclined to enjoy that than most female readers. Yes, I know there are exceptions, whatever.

The Sunday Philosophy Club

 

By Alexander McCall Smith

Isabel and a companion are at a concert when they see a young man fall to his death from the upper deck of the hall. 

Witnessing a tragedy like that leads Isabel into a an investigation of the man and what may have led to his death and whether it was an accident or something else.

Being a woman of wealth and means, Isabel has the time to undertake such an investigation. Her friends don't think it is a good idea, but she ignores their advice. Her inquiries lead her to conclude that the dead did not fall, that there were reasons he might have been pushed, mainly insider trading. His position at the firm where he worked may have led him to suspect that people in the business were using inside information to take advantage of the markets.

Was this why he died? Or was it a romantic entanglement? Or perhaps it truly was just that he lost his balance and fell? Isabel stirs things up and finds more than one villain. And her own life may be in danger as a consequence.

This was an OK mystery story. The evildoers are unmasked but oddly no one is brought to justice, which made for a rather weak ending, I think.

Here is a review of the novel by Kirkus Reviews.

Island of the Sequined Love Nun

 

By Christopher Moore

Tuck is a jet pilot who kills his career when he gets loaded and crashes the company jet while having sex with a prostitute. Desperate for work, Tuck takes a job as a pilot for a Pacific island-based medical charity.

The charity is run by a doctor and his nurse/wife. But it doesn't take Tuck long to figure out that these two are up to something unsavory. Like how can a small, local charity afford a Learjet? What is in the coolers that they transport via the jet to Japan? Something that is so special that the wife guards it with a gun.

Eventually Tuck figures out that the two Westerners are taking advantage of the natives' cargo cult and are using it to bamboozle the islanders into becoming organ donors and that the people don't really understand how they are being used. It all comes to a head for Tuck when he realizes the doctor removed the corneas of a little boy for transport to Japan and they justified it to him by claiming the boy was already blind and didn't need his corneas. He also realizes it is up to him to put a stop to their organ-harvesting operation.

This was a very amusing story and it has lots of funny moments. For example, two native men are talking about a People Magazine and what the one who could read is sharing from it:

"'But look!" Malink pointed to a picture of a man with unnaturally large ears, "This man is a king and he wishes to be a tampon. It is quoted."

Sarapul scrunched up his face . . . while he tried to figure out what, exactly, a tampon was. Finally he said, "I was a tampon once, back in the old days, before you were born. All warriors became tampons. It was better then."

"You have never been a tampon," Malink stated, although he couldn't be sure. "Only a king may be a tampon."'

This too, when Tuck gets grabbed by the locals and tied up:

'The native said something in his own language, which Tuck took to be "Cut him down," because a second later he found himself falling into the arms of four strong islanders who lowered him to the ground.

Tucker's arms and legs burned as the blood rushed back into them. Above him he saw a circle of moonlit brown faces. He managed to grab enough breath to squeak, "Soon as I'm on my feet, your asses are mine. You all might as well just go practice falling down for a while so you'll be used to it. Just order the body bags now 'cause when I'm done, you're going to look like piles of chocolate pudding. They'll be cleaning you up with shovels—you . . . " Tuck's breath caught in his throat and he passed out.

"Malink looked at his old friend Favo and smiled. "Excellent threat," he said.

"Most excellent threat," Favo said.

Sarapul pushed his way through the kneeling men. "He's dead. Let's eat him."

"He no like that," Kimi said. "Not even for free."'

And here, a reporter is musing on his job:

'The notes read: "They caught the pig thief. Now what?"

You could run down leads, pound the pavement, check all your facts with two sources, then structure your meticulously gathered information into the inverted pyramid form and what you got was: The pig's owner had gotten drunk and beat up his wife, so she sold his pig to someone on the outer islands and bought a used stun gun . . .  The next time her husband got rough, a group of Japanese tourists found him by the side of the road, sizzling in the dirt like a strip of frying bacon. Mistaking him for a street performer, the tourists clapped joyously, took pictures of each other standing beside the electrocuted man, and gave his wife five dollars. The whole intrigue had been exposed when police found the pig-stealing wife in front of the Continental Hotel charging tourists a dollar apiece to watch her zap her husband's twitching supine body. The stun gun was confiscated, no charges were pressed, and the wife beater was pronounced unharmed by a Peace Corps volunteer, although he did need to be reminded several times of his name, where he lived, and how many children he had.'

 It's a funny story, even if the subject matter is rather horrible and very sad.

Here is a review of the story by Kirkus Reviews. 

Take a Bow, B.C.

 

By Johnny Hart

Copyright for this book is 1966 and 1967. In this collection we meet Grog, the prehistoric man, who is basically a head on legs. And also the apteryx (aka a kiwi bird) both of which are fun additions to the comic strip.

Swine Not?

 

By Jimmy Buffett

Rumpy is a pot-bellied pig that is originally from the New York City area. But she moved away when her humans moved away too. Now she is back in NYC, living on the roof of a posh hotel with Ellie, the mom and Ellie's two kids, Barley and Maple. Ellie is a pastry chef at the hotel and their accomdation was supplied by the hotel, the apartment on the hotel's roof.

The problem is that the hotel does not permit exotic pets, like pot-bellied pigs. So Rumpy has to be smuggled in to the rooftop apartment and out for walks and exercise. This chore is left mainly to the two kids, Barley and Maple. They figured out a way to sneak the pig in and out by hiding her in a room service trolley.

What no one in Rumpy's human family knows is that Rumpy is a pig on a mission. She wants to find her twin brother, Lukie, with whom she lost contact when she moved with her family away from NYC. Fortunately, she has made contact with a squadron of pigeons, the Pigilantes, who patrol the skies above the local environs and who know everything worth knowing about the area.

I don't know how I ended up with this book. It became quite obvious that this is meant for kids. I expect they would find it funny and exciting and interesting. I found it boring. Oddly, Google's AI says the book was intended for general audiences. I don't really understand how that could be. It's not even slightly funny.

B.C. Big Wheel

 

By Johnny Hart

The copyright dates from 1963 and 1964. This collection features the usual gang and their lives in the beginning of time with modern times popping in unexpectedly through golf and baseball and hotels and a snakeskin marked as made in Japan. We also find out that the turtle's name is John. Named after the author? Time marches on but the comic strips remains just as funny as when it first started out.

The Rivals

 

By Richard Brinsley Sheridan

A play in five acts. This edition comes with a Preface, by the author, and two Prologues and an Epilogue. It was Sheridan's first play, staged in 1775.

The main characters are Lydia Languish and Captain Absolute, aka Ensign Beverly. Second in importance are Julia, Lydia's cousin, and Faulkland, Captain Absolute's friend.

Captain Absolute is in love with Lydia. But apparently Lydia has a romantic fantasy of an illict lover and subsequent elopement. Catering to her fantasy, Captain Absolute becomes Ensign Beverly, a young man of little means and wholely unacceptable to her family and with the promise of defiance to Julia's family and an exciting elopement. 

Meanwhile, there is Lydia's cousin, Julia, who is engaged to be married to Faulkland. However, Faulkland seems to be unable to accept that Julia truly loves him and is constantly testing her love to see if it is genuine. Which ultimately leads to romantic disaster.

Back to the Captain, disguised as Beverly, who finds his romantic pursuit blows up in his face when Lydia learns he is not a penniless nobody, but a man of wealth and of good family. All her silly dreams of a runaway marriage dissolve and she is left feeling duped and resentful.

Throw in a couple duels, a cowardly country rube and an unreasonably angry Irishman, and a couple of confounded parental types, and you have a screwball comedy that was probably considered hilarious in its day. I watched a stage performance of the play on YouTube and the laughs were few and far between. Mildly amusing at the most.

Middlegame

 

By Seanan McGuire

A. Deborah Baker was probably the world's most skilled modern alchemist. So skilled she manufactured a human being of her own, James Reed. Reed was also a greatly skilled alchemist which is something his peers should have kept in mind. But just like they did with Baker, treating her as inferior simply because she was a woman, they also acknowledged Reed's skills but did not give him the respect he craved. For this error, they would pay for their lives in one fell swoop.

Reed was an ambitious creature and he wanted to rule the Universe by bringing about the Impossible City. Once this was accomplished, he would have the powers of an actual god. But since Reed was a cruel monster, this would be horrendous for everyone and everything else.

Reed had a plan. If he could embody the Doctrine of Ethos in human form, this would trigger the Impossible City. [I wish I could explain this idea better, but frankly it is way beyond my ability to even understand what the author was on about.] Reed did this by making lab grown twin babies who, as they matured, would come together and [ I didn't comprehend that part either] become the Doctrine of Ethos. [I never figured out what the Doctrine of Ethos was.] 

There were lots of failures. But finally Reed has two sets of twins who seemed to be shaping up to attain success manifesting the Doctrine. The oldest set was headed down the right track, but there were also problems. The younger set of twins was Reed's backup plan if the first set crashed and burned.

So the plan required that the twins be kept separate until maturity. So one twin was fostered on the East Coast of the US and the other twin on the West Coast. But distance was not enough to keep the kids apart and they found each other, psychically. The male twin, Roger, was a whiz at words. The female twin, Dodger, was a whiz at math.

Meanwhile, Reed and his chief minion, Leigh, the bloodthirsty witch, were busy making life hard for the younger set of twins and for anyone else who happened to be in their orbit. These two villains are just about as nasty as is possible to be. 

By the time Roger and Dodger are college age, Reed has decided they will not do and he sends his minions to murder them. But one of the minions is not loyal and she helps Roger and Dodger escape. Leigh, the witch, hunts them down and the battle ensues.

This book was way too long. And it required a suspension of belief of which I was not capable. I never got the Doctine of Ethos thing figured out or why it's achievement would create godlike beings of the twins or why once they reached their godhood they would pay any attention to the crazed desires of those two lunatic monsters, Reed and Leigh. 

Most of the book is about Roger and Dodger growing up and finding each other and discovering their special connection. On and on it went, it got really boring. And the evil machinations of Reed and Leigh in the background also went on and on.

But towards the end, it was like reading a video game, where the two hero twins have to face the final bosses. Meh. I don't like those kind of video games. The closer I got to the end, the more I just skipped so much wordage, just wanting it over. Frankly, if I hadn't spent almost $30 for the book, I probably would have just quit halfway, 250 pages in.

However, it seems lots of readers really like the book. So I will call it a good read. I just think I was not brainy enough to enjoy it. Maybe it should have a warning, like You Must Have a High IQ to Understand this Novel.

Here is a review by Kirkus.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

 

By Jeanette Waterson

An novel, even though the main character is also named Jeanette and her and the author were both adopted by religious fanatics. So that's something.

Anyway, fictional Jeanette is adopted by Christian fundamentalists. Well, actually the mother is the religious nutter. The father is a nonentity in the story. The mother, Louie, is quite devoted to her religion and her adopted daughter is being raised in the faith too. No problem, the daughter is nearly as gung-ho as the mother. That is until love enters the picture, in the form of another girl.

So Jeanette's first love is a girl and so is her second love and her third love and so on. Which is ok until Louie finds out and blabs everything to the church she is devoted to. And the churchy people decide Jeanette is possessed by the devil and needs an exorcism. Jeanette doesn't respond well to the exorcism and becomes quite ill. 

When she recovers, it soon become apparent that the exorcism was a failure because Jeanette is still falling in loves with girls. Eventually her sexual preference results in not only being kicked out of their little church but out of the only home she has ever known. Now nearly grown, she has to find work and make her own way in the world without the love and support of her adoptive parents. 

This supposedly comic novel, per the blurbs on the cover ("[Waterson] has mastered both comedy and tragedy in this rich little novel." "A daring, unconventional comic novel . . . told with romping humor" "quirky and subtle hilarity of Winterson's autobiographical first novel") was boring and not what I would call comical or subtly hilarious. And it is interspersed with some weird fantasy stuff that was puzzling and I supposed was an allegory for the character's feelings or life or whatever, but I didn't care for those intrusions into the story. 

But apparently the literary world loves this novel, so what do I know? Nothing, most likely.

This is not a review but is a distillation by John Crace (Digested Classics it's called) from The Guardian. It pretty much covers the main points and I get the feeling he didn't really care much for the fantasy bits either.

Rogue Protocol

 

By Martha Wells

Third book in the Murderbot Diaries.

Rin is headed off to a terraforming facility orbiting a planet as a leg in its search to gather more information about the evil corporation GrayCris that was behind the deaths in the first book, All Systems Red, boarding a ship as a stowaway. The ship contains a small group of humans and their humanoid pet bot Miki. The humans have been hired to inspect the terraforming facility before the new owners take possession. 

But, once again, Rin finds itself having to defend a bunch of hapless humans incapable of defending themselves, especially when it becomes clear that the two security people they hired are working with the attackers. Rin again questions itself about why it keeps getting involved with defenseless humans.

I think one of the best things about this series, other than the main character, is that the books are not 300 or 400 pages long. This one is only 158 pages long. I enjoy reading books but these modern books are just too full of excessive details. I really feel most novels today could use serious trimming. It is so nice to sit down to read a book you know you can finish reading in a day or two. 

But besides the convenient length of the book, is Rin. Once again Rin is smack in the middle of a huge mess and not only manages to extricate itself, it also saves the humans involved. And learns a lesson about the itself too, in the form of the pet bot, Miki. Just an exciting and touching story, I'm looking forward to the next book in the series, Exit Strategy.

Kirkus Reviews has a review of the novel.