Bitsy’s Bait & BBQ

28 February 2007 by Melissa

When Kate Dodson bought Bitsy’s B&B on ebay, she thought she was buying a bed and breakfast in the Ozarks. Well, the Ozarks part was right, but Kate, her sister Emma, and her young son soon find themselves running a bait shop and barbecue restaurant, where their cooking is so bad, their speciality becomes all you can eat toast.

There’s romance, of course, in the form of Kate’s ex-husband who lets his rich mother rule his life, but really just wants Kate back, and there’s also a cast of locals to add color.

This is a fast read, good for a slow afternoon in the sunshine, with a glass of cold sweet tea, and author Pamela Morsi does an excellent job of making the setting seem familiar enough that it could be the lakeside town you drove through last summer.

Carpe Demon

16 February 2007 by Melissa

Carpe Demon: Adventures of a Demon-Hunting Soccer Mom

I picked up Carpe Demon while on a lengthy visit to a local Half Price Books with my husband and brother-in-law, and read half of it while we were there, but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago that I ordered it from Amazon.com along with its sequel.

I was hooked at first by the tag line, about how the protagonist, Kate, was something like an adult (as in grown up, not as in XXX) version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but while the whole “California girl fights demons” think does make their stories seem similar, Kate is not not at all like Buffy. For one thing, Kate has a husband, two children, one of whom is a teenager, and a minivan. As well, her demon hunting doesn’t seem to be mystical calling, as much as a choice made when she was largely choiceless.

Still, the snappy dialogue, humor-laced action sequences, and fast-paced plot made this book an enjoyable and entertaining read, and I’m currently in the middle of the sequel.

Atlantis Found

23 October 2005 by Melissa

Clive Cussler

My friend Rana mentioned the movie Sahara, and Clive Cussler books as a guilty pleasure in one of her blog entries, so when I saw several of his books on the library shelf, I picked one at random.

Atlantis Found reimagines the typical lost society of Atlantis and ties them together with a group of Nazi survivors hiding in South America and plotting to take over the world – on the surface not terribly original, except that it’s a Dirk Pitt novel which means there are exotic locations and cool gadgets and a sort of Indiana Jones / James Bond sense of fun.

I enjoyed the book a lot, but couldn’t talk about it because I knew it would be the type of thing Fuzzy would enjoy, and, indeed, he’s been reading it all weekend. I’m not sure I could read Cussler in large doses, but every so often, a visit with Mr. Pitt might not be ill-advised.

The Quilter’s Apprentice

30 December 2004 by Melissa

Jennifer Chiaverini
I picked this book up on impulse – it looked interesting, and I’ve had quilting on the brain lately – and was instantly hooked. Some of the formatting is annoying, specifically the lack of quotation marks in the ‘flashback’ sequences, but it does a good job of meshing lessons in quilting technique with the plot.

The story is a simple one, a young couple moves from a Pennsylvania college town to another town a bit farther away, because the husband, who has a degree in landscape engineering, has been offered a permanent stable position, and the wife has recently come to realize she hates her job as an accountant.

The husband’s clients include the owner of an estate that used to be owned by a horse breeder, and the wife bonds with the sister of the dead owner, who agrees to teach her how to quilt. From that point, the narrative is interrupted by flashbacks from the woman in charge of the estate, as well as quilting lessons.

There are, apparently, other novels in the series, as well as a website where you can see the quilts mentioned

in the story (some are ugly).

Incubus Dreams

13 December 2004 by Melissa

Laurell K. Hamilton

I’ve been a fan of Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series since 1998, when I spied a copy of The Lunatic Cafe on the shelf at the Barnes and Noble in Sioux Falls. Of course, I immediately had to go back and read the rest of the novels in the series, which was, at the time, only four books long.

Now, eight books later, I’m still addicted to Hamilton’s cast of characters and soft-porn storytelling, but I wish there was a little bit more story in this offering, Incubus Dreams.

To be fair, it is a transitional novel, and it does that job well. Anita, in this incarnation, is finally beginning to make peace with who and what she is. In fact, for the first time, she’s beginning to show real signs of maturity.

The plot, what there is of it, isn’t very obvious – there’s a string of murders, of course, but there are vast stretches of the novel where they’re not even mentioned, and the solution, when it comes, is sort of a throwaway, but the character development is much more interesting – Nathaniel is becoming three-dimensional, and Richard is ‘back’ in a sense.

I’m looking forward to finding out what happens next.

Stormqueen, and others

24 October 2004 by Melissa

Marion Zimmer Bradley

After a break during which I read some more modern novels, I went back to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Darkover series, and read all the books that had been missing from my own collection, largely thanks to the folks at Half Price Books.

I’m not going to list every title, but I am going to mention that my favorite of the second batch of books was Stormqueen, though I’m certain this had to do with the weather outside the apartment matching the weather in the book.

Small things like that influence me far too greatly.

Still, it’s a great series, especially if you really want to immerse yourself in another world.

Traitor’s Sun (and others)

6 October 2004 by Melissa

Marion Zimmer Bradley

During the months of August and September, I was under a self-imposed book-buying moratorium, while we packed the house, and moved from California to Texas. However, I was still engaged in retro-reading, and, because I hadn’t read the series in a long time, I indulged in re-reading the entire Darkover series, by Marion Zimmer Bradley.

Darkover is one of my favorite fictional worlds, partly because there are so many novels in the series, and partly because the culture is believable. Rather than listing every novel in an independent entry, I offer the list (in series order, not publication order) of the novels I read before arriving in Texas.

Darkover Landfall
Hawkmistress
Two to Conquer
The Shattered Chain
Thendara House
Rediscovery
The Spell Sword
The Forbidden Tower
Star of Danger
Winds of Darkover
Heritage of Hastur
Sharra’s Exile
Exile’s Song
The Shadow Matrix
Traitor’s Sun

The Black Jewels Trilogy

31 July 2004 by Melissa

Anne Bishop

It was my friend Liz who introduced me to Anne Bishop and the Black Jewels trilogy. I read the series as indiviudal novels, but it’s apparently available in an omnibus edition as well.

Essentially, it’s a fantasy series, that takes place in three different Realms (read: planes) of a single planet, and follows the life of a girl named Jaenelle from the age of 12 through her early adulthood. Most of the characters in the novel are witches (or warlords), and the jewels signify the depths of their powers. The fun of the books comes a lot from the names of the other characters. How can you not love a series that has folk called Saetan and Lucivar? How can you not love a race of winged humanoids, or telephathic puppies?

True, it’s not great literature, but mind candy is perfectly acceptable, and I’d argue that reading ANYTHING is better than not reading at all. And these novels may be mind candy, but they’re good mind candy.

Islands

10 June 2004 by Melissa

Anne Rivers Siddons

We all have “guilty pleasure” authors – Anne Rivers Siddons is one of mine.

I’ve just finished her most recent novel, Islands, and while I have to agree that it’s not her best work, it was still an enjoyable read. She’s returned to the South Carolina Low Country she loves so much, which means that even when you hate the characters, you love the houses they live in, and even when the plot gets rather cheesey, you can still feel the sea breezes and smell the sand, and feel the humidity.

People are often surprised that I read Siddons’ work, because her target demographic is really my mother’s generations, but there’s something compelling about her tragic heroines in their weathered beach houses. Though, admittedly, my favorite of her novels didn’t take place anywhere near a beach.

This novel tells the story of a group of friends – doctors and their wives – who own a Low Country beach house together. It’s fairly typical beach reading: entangled relationships, personal tragedy, a dash of romance. It’s not as meaty as, say, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, but I’d still recommended it.