Ambrose is an odd kid. Because he has an anaphalactic reaction to peanuts, his mother is over protective. Afraid to loose him after the sudden death of his father, Ambrose’s mother won’t allow him to do anything without her. No hanging out with friends after school, no sports. Add to that the fact that they have moved every few years so that his mother can take another low paying sessional lecturer job, and it becomes easy to see why Ambrose has trouble relating to his peers.

Things get so bad that Ambrose is slipped a peanut by a school bully and nearly dies. His mother decides to pull him out of school and homeschool him. This means she has to shift her work hours to the evening, leaving Ambrose alone. At first, he enjoys his freedom, but he quickly becomes bored. Stumbling across a flyer for a Scrabble Club, Ambrose hatches a plan to get a ride from his landlord’s ex-convict son. Unbeknowst to Ambrose, this sets off a chain of events that will turn his world upside down, while at the same time allow him to stand on hsi own two feet for the first time.

Author Susin Nielsen has created a wonderful story about those people on the fringe of social groups, as well as allowing people the space to change. Brilliant, without being preachy. (show less)

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[ Currently: Editing a podcast while I drink my tea ]
You want to know what will replace the Vampire as the new teen supernatural boyfriend? Angels or their descendants. Cassandra Clark used them in the Mortal Instruments trilogy, Repossesed has the fallen angel angle going and Usborne is planning an angel trilogy, to name a few.

Hush, Hush by Becca Fitzpatrick is the latest in this trend. It’s main character is Nora, a typical High School student. She and her best friend, Vree, shop, talk about boys and sit beside each other in every class they can. That all changes when her biology teacher makes them switch seats and Nora ends up beside Patch, a very good looking new student who gives off an alien vibe.

Turns out that Patch is fallen angel who may or may not have nefarious plans for Nora. Nora knows it, but yet she finds herself drawn to him. Can she figure out who to trust before it’s too late.

Though the writing and characterization is fine, I can not recommend this book. Clearly aimed at the Twilight market, this book suffers from one fatal flaw. It is part of a growing group of modern teen girl fiction that shows true love only exists in abusive relationships. Patch stalks Nora through a great deal of this book, forcing her to go on dates with him and generally harassing her. I get that girls like to rebel by dating the bad boy, but surely in this day and age we can tell young women that relationships can be epic and desirable without being unhealthy.

This will not be making the What to Read After Harry list.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
You’ve heard of Duff Goldman. You may not know his name, but you know his work. As the owner of Charm City Cakes, he makes his way into your living room every week with Ace of Cakes, the reality show that documents the cakes made for various events and the stories behind them.

This is not a cookbook, but rather a documentation of how Charm City Cakes came to be and how it came to be on TV. There are also bios of all the cast and crew of the show, plus details on how the show is produced. I, for one, finally learned what a writer on a reality show actually does.

This book also includes lots, and lots of photos. Photos of finished cakes, photos of cakes in progress, photos of the various bands to which the Charm City crew all belong.

If I had any criticism, it would be that the cake gallery is too small. I would have preferred page after page of cakes and a short paragraph about the cake rather than the six page fold out that looked more like a yearbook collage.

Still worth picking up.

[  Mood: Sick ]
[  Currently: Watching Tbitha’s Salon Takeover ]
Urban fantasy has exploded all over the publishing landscape. In some cases it has gotten messy, with poorly-written potboilers masking as genre fiction. Luckily, Kitty and the Midnight Hour is not one of these.

Kitty Norville didn’t want to be a werewolf. Radio DJ was more her speed. But that all changed the night she was attacked. Now Kitty has no choice but to follow the rules of the pack and not let on to anyone in her life that she is a werewolf.

That all changes when her night DJ job suddenly turns into a supernatural call-in show. Now Kitty finds herself the target of a professional hit, pulled into a murder investigation and outed as a werwolf to all her listeners. This sets off the werewolf pack politics, leading to more attacks and Kitty’s world being further upset.

A well writen novel that takes a wimpy submissive character to a woman who is begining to take charge of her life. Vaughn has clearly left it open for sequels and for further growth in Kitty. While not in the league of Jim Butcher and Kim Harrison, it is worthy of a look.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Watching My son colour ]
Ful Title: I Am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to Be Your Class President

Oliver Watson is of a grade 7 boy whose mother thinks his is brilliant and special, but everyone else, including his father, thinks is an idiot. Little do any of them know, Oliver is really the head of an international corporate empire. He only pretends to be stupid in order to throw people off the scent and keep his empire intact.

Then one day, he decides to run for class president, in order to get back at his father. This leads to a series of adventures and misadventures that lead to a near unmasking of his carefully constructed world, and revelations that some people are not what he estimated them to be.

Bitingly funny, this book from Daily Show writer Josh Lieb is an easy read with scenes that will linger in your head for days. A must read.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Watching My son play and hoping he doesn’t trash the joint ]
I remeber having Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh read to me when I was in grade 5 by the school librarian. She would take a group into the library at lunch and read to us. I loved it so much, I made my mom take me to the movie. Which was nowhere near as good, as my ten year-old nitpicker told everyone.

So it was with fond memories that I turned recentlt to Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. The book telss the story og a widowed field mouse with four young children wintering in the garden of the farm. One of them, Timothy, has fallen ill and can’t be moved. The problem is that the time for the move to summer home has come. If they don’t move, they will be killed when the farmer plows his field.

Through a series of events, Mrs. Frisby turns to the rats that live under the rosebush for help. In doing so, she learns that her late husband had a history that she had no idea about and Mrs. Frisby is pulled into something far more dangerous and fantastic that she could ever imagine.

This book may be almost forty years old, but it is still one of the best animal fantasy novels for children out there. This is one that a modern child (both boy and girl) could still enjoy, so much so that it will be in the next After Harry.

Go get this.

[  Mood: Sick ]
[  Currently: Watching House ]
I am familiar with Julie Kenner’s Work and have discussed it here before. Today I finished the first book of her adult series.

Imagine if Buffy got married and settled in surburbia. Then you would have Carpe Demon, Julie Kenner’s suburban fantasy. Kate Hunter was a Hunter, a hitman for the Vatican who spent years tracking down vampires, demons and other suernatural baddies, but then she fell in love with another Hunter, retired, got married and settled down. But her Hunter husband Eric passed away and she eventually married Stuart. Now she has two kids and worries more about carpool than demon hunting.

Unfortunately, a demon shatters Kate’s world when it shatters her front window just before she is to host a dinner party. It appear that her old life has caught up with her. Now she must balance a teenage daughter starting high school, getting her two year-old son into daycare and supporting her husband’s political aspirations all while try to figure out why the demons have suddenly invaded the town.

A superb suburban fantasy from Julie Kenner.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Watching My son sleep ]
The Court of the Air is a brings us a very old plot with slightly new trappings. Two orphans are key to protecting the world from its destruction. They are hunted by the forces of evil who want to stop them. They are also aided by small groups of friends, some of whom pay the ultimate price.

The new trappings of this story, a blend of steampunk and fantasy set in a world not our own, but heavily based on our own. The Jackles are clearly the British, with a society reminiscent of the Victorians. The Commonshare is also reminisacent of the Soviet Union. There are also an entire species of machines, not to mention walking, talking crustaceans. Woven into that is the use of magic by some and an entire group of people who have been twisted by coming into contact with something called the feymist, granting them special powers.

As a read, this book is brilliant at times, and at others a grind to get through. Author Hunt has bought into the current trend of gritty fantasy trend. Bad things happen to innocent people in this book, and Hunt lets you see it. An extrodinary number of those forementioned nice people die trying to help the two orphans save the world. At one point I began to ask myself if they all wore red shirts. And the collateral damage in this book is horrifying.

At the core of this book is Hunt’s philosophy of a yin and a yang. One orphan is the offensive weapon of the forces of good, while the male is the defensive weapon. And while that is lovely idea, it gets a little clumsy at times. At other points it is completely transparent what the author is doing. If Hunt had chosen to edit this work a bit more, refining his ideas, it would have turned out better. As it stands, I have read better steampunk stories involving orphans before.

Take it or leave it.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Watching My son play and trying to stop him from terrorizing the cat ]
I picked this book up on a lark. I watch House and LOVED BlackAdder, so I am well aware that Hugh Laurie has many facets to his talent. "What the hay," I thought, "if it sucks, I can mock him."

Well suprisingly, this is quite a good geo-political intrigue novel. Laurie injects some wry and dry British humour into the proceedings, which brings some freshness to what could have been a tired old tale of an ex-soldier caught up in the international weapons trade. There is also some wag-the-dog elements here that add to the complexity of the plot.

This is a quick moving, engaging book that is a fun read. It also proves that Laurie is a multi-talented guy that has a literary career if he ever tires of acting.

[  Mood: Amused ]
[  Currently: Listening to CBC Radio ]
It is no secret that I have said some not so nice things about this series in the past, but yet I retun to it book after book, hoping that Hamilton will have gotten over exploring her sexual fantasies and actually write plot driven fiction.

It appears my prayers have finally been answered in her latest novel, Skin Trade.

And when I said that my prayers have been answered, I wasn’t kidding. Hamilton doesn’t let Anita have sex until after page 300 of the book. There are a total of three sex scenes in this book; two we see and one that we don’t. That has to be the smallest number in an Anita Blake novel in a long time.

Instead, we are treated to a plot full of tension and action, which harkens bake to the early entries in this series. We open with Anita receiving a severed head in the mail from vampire and serial killer, Vittorio. He has apperantly also left her a note, appropriately in blood, at the crime scene in hopes of drawing her to Los Vegas.

Anita has no choice but to go, but once there is forced to defend her reputation when the local cops accuse her of being a slut, while fending off the advances of another US Marshall (who is, coincidentally, also a serial killer), the political machinations of the local weretiger queen and the attempts of a very old European vampire to take control of her.

Hamilton may have finally found the balance between the sex and the action for which she claims to have been looking for all along. The only thing that detracts from the story is the constant "vetting" that Anita has to go through. Either Anita is on tough cookie who is really good at her job, or she isn’t. Having to have her prove it to every cop she runs into and go through the same arguments with the same ineundos and accusations being made is getting as tiring as the sex scenes used to be. Until she resolves this constant melodrama, her writing will never be as good as it was in the early books.