read full post >

The story of the cool, collected, imperturbable Englishman Phileas Fogg and his passionate, good-hearted, sometimes hapless manservant, the Frenchman Jean Passepartout, and their famous trip around the world. Fogg lives his life completely by regimen, every day the same down to the minute he arrives at the Reform Club (he fired his previous servant because he couldn't keep up that schedule). Then, suddenly, on a bet-- to prove it can be done, and that "the unforeseen does not exist"-- he sets off around the world. He doesn't do it for the money that is wagered; in fact, he spends nearly all of the remaining half of his fortune that he didn't wager, so by winning he just breaks even. He doesn't do it for the adventure or to see the sights; Passepartout does quite a bit more looking at sights than Fogg, who is simply planning his next train or steamer. Certainly, Fogg doesn't shy away from adventure-- he saves Auoda from suttee because he has time, and he calmly and repeatedly bails out Passepartout, even to the point of chasing after American Indians to rescue him.

Read more...

read full post >

I purchased and read this book because it was the ebook was sale for 99 cents, and the description of the protagonist intrigued me: a woman math professor on the run, who sees patterns and numbers and also knows about poker from her father. I was rather disappointed with the character of Dr. Renee Carter-- she seems like the generic pretty-lady plucky heroine, with a few trappings and comments to remind us she works as a college professor. Dr. Carter accidentally gets in trouble with some bad guys because, in her role as mentor to the campus poker club, she notices a statistical anomaly that would significantly benefit the owners of the website. Because of this, a couple of bad guys come to "take care of" her and the other professors she consulted about the data. When the hit men frame Renee for the murder of the local sheriff, she ends up on the run with the regional detective who was called in, Trent Schaefer. Carter can tell there is something off about Trent (he's a little too good at surviving on the run), something he's not telling her, but she never really does figure it out, and the best that can really be said is that she survives.

Read more...

read full post >

This sequel to The Eight primarily follows Alexandra, the daughter of Cat and Solarin-- although it couldn't follow The Eight properly if it didn't also have a parallel story in another time line (filled with cameos of famous historical personages); among others, this alternate story includes Charlot, the prophet son of Mireille, but it also includes some new characters including the young Haid&eactue;e, the adopted daughter of Ali Pasha who makes a journey from Albania to Europe- in part to find her natural father, Byron; but of course, there is something to do with pieces from a certain chess set. As a child, Alexandra was a chess prodigy, and on a fateful trip to Russia - where she might have become the youngest chess grandmaster ever had she won - her father is shot and killed. Now, Alexandra is a young woman living in D.C., working at an open-hearth restaurant, and completely estranged from her mother-- until she gets a strange, mysterious invitation to her mother's birthday party in Colorado. what Alexandra doesn't know is that she is being drawn into the Game that her mother has tried to protect her from since Alexandra was a child.

Read more...

read full post >

Prudence and Robin Tremaine are a brother and sister fleeing to London, and because Robin was involved in the Jacobite rebellion on the wrong side, they disguise themselves-- the tall Prudence pretends to be a young man, and the slight, elegant, talented actor Robin pretends to be the sister. On their way to London, they run into flighty young Letitia, who is eloping with a man because she thought it would be quite an adventure, but he turns out to be rather a brute and after her money. Robin and Prudence manage to rescue her shortly before Letitia's family friend, Anthony Fanshawe comes to help her-- a man so large that Robin teasingly calls him "the mountain" to his sister (a man large enough for so tall a girl). Anthony takes the young lad (Prudence) under his wing when they go to London, introducing him around and sponsoring him at the gentleman's club; meanwhile, Robin and Letitia become rather intimate friends (Robin has fallen in love with the silly girl, so on a few occasions-- like a masked ball-- he manages to be her mysterious, romantic hero). Eventually, Prudence and Robin's father comes to town-- he's an adventurer and master of disguise, and perhaps a bit of a con man, so even they aren't sure whether or not they can believe him when he claims to be the long lost son and heir to a nearby estate.

Read more...

read full post >

This book is somewhat of a sequel to These Old Shades (which I read recently), as it follows Dominic Alastair, Marquis of Vidal. The "cub" of the title, he is the son of the Duke of Avon (who was known as "Satanas" to some, hence the title) and the fiery Leonie, and Heyer presents Vidal as a pretty believable mixture of his parents. He has his father's lack of morals and devil-may-care attitude, but he has his mother's quick temper instead of his father's subtlety and deviousness. He gets in a bit of trouble because he wounds someone in a duel-- and, what apparently makes it worse, he didn't even bother to go through the proper forms, but had the duel right then and there in the house where they were gambling. His father is quite angry with him and decides to send him to France, but this is mostly because Leonie is upset rather than that Vidal may have killed a man. Since Vidal is used to having pretty much whatever he wants, he decides to take along with him the pretty bourgeoisie girl who he has been flirting with-- but, of course, things don't go exactly as planned.

Read more...

read full post >

One night as Justin Alastair, Duke of Avon is walking through the streets of Paris, he collides with a poor young red-headed boy running from his rough older brother. On a bit of a whim, because something about the child's Titian hair and blue eyes reminds him of an enemy, Alastair buys the lad from the older brother and makes the child, Léon, his page. Alastair has quite the reputation for his cunning and lack of morals, such that he is known by some as "Satanas", and his good friend Hugh Davenant disapproves of Alastair taking this child with him everywhere, even serving him at gambling houses and other places of ill-repute. Of course, there is a great mystery about Léon, and it turns out to be quite an interesting story-- and the audience gets to be at least partly in on Alastair's knowledge and plans long before the other characters in the book.

Read more...

read full post >

A young girl in a lonely part of Montana buries her younger brother, who had been the last living member of her family, says the prayer her mother said over the other family graves, and then sets out on horseback by herself fleeing from the rough young men her brother had been hanging out with-- in particular their leader, the man she suspects killed her brother, and who wants to claim her for himself. On her second day of travel, she sees another man on horseback pursuing her, and she flees him as well because her mother had told her all men are the same, dangerous drunks. While she sleeps, the man catches up to her-- but he is in fact a city boy who had come out West with some friends to get away from his troubles (the society girl he was in love with wouldn't have him), and he had gotten separated from his party and lost in the wilderness. She has some food and the survival skills to get them through to civilization, and when he hears her story of the man she is running from, he naturally wants to help and protect her. They travel together for a while, once even drawn to a Christian Endeavor meeting by the music, which keeps them hidden from the ruffians who go by while they are inside, and the girl is encouraged by words from scripture of the religion she had scarcely known anything of. They make it safely to a city big enough to have a train station and the young man, George, learns via telegram that his mother is seriously ill, so he sells his horse and returns-- he encourages his young friend, who he has come to admire, to come with him, but she refuses because she believes he is promised to another, and a kind woman at a farm where they stayed overnight had told her it wasn't proper to travel alone with a man. They go their separate ways, and he only knows her first name-- Elizabeth.

Read more...

read full post >

Sir Tristram Shield comes to visit his dying uncle Sylvester, the Lord of Lavenham, and since it is Sylvester's wish, Tristram agrees to marry his younger, half-French cousin Eustacie. Tristram is a practical, unromantic kind of gentleman, so to Eustacie he seems completely unfeeling when he won't follow along in her flights of fancy at how sorry he should feel to see her going to the guillotine wearing a white dress (she was brought out of France long before there was any danger of that), or when she asks him to ride at full-speed to her deathbed when she dies in childbirth-- he replies quite practically that he wouldn't go out on such an occasion, but this doesn't suit Eustacie at all. Quite quickly, Eustacie convinces herself and her maid that she will be completely miserable married to Tristram (she's probably right-- and she would likely make him miserable as well), so she decides to run away and become a governess (her only qualification for such a job is that she speaks French). As she makes her way out in the night, she runs into a group of smugglers (or "free-traders")-- and their leader is, of course, her disgraced cousin Ludovic Lavenham, heir to Sylvester. Everyone assumed he had fled the country due to the suspicion that he murdered a man who took a family heirloom, a talisman ring, in payment for gambling debts and then would not return it. When Ludovic, Eustacie, and Tristram all end up together again and Tristram and Ludovic finally believe each other that neither of them killed the man, they set about finding the person who did-- and in particular, finding the talisman ring that will clear Ludovic's name.

Read more...

read full post >

I met him in the street called Straight.

How can you not love an opening line like that? It catches my attention right away and communicates so much with so few words.

Christy Mansel is vacationing in Damascus and runs into her cousin Charles. They decide to drop in and visit on their eccentric Great Aunt Harriet, who has been living on her own in a crumbling, isolated old palace, much like the legendary Lady Hester Stanhope. Charles is detained by business, so while Christy is out on a driving tour she decides to stop by and see if they can visit later. She finds things much stranger than expected, and ends up staying the night in order to meet her aunt, who keeps strange hours. But in the morning, the river is in flood and Christy is stuck. Christy's description of Great Aunt Harriet and the whole situation strikes Charles as being "a bit off", so he does a bit of rock climbing and sneaks into the palace, and they do some exploring and investigating together. Of course, they find that things are not at all what they seem; someone has been taking advantage of this isolated spot to smuggle drugs, which is both very lucrative and very dangerous.

I was surprised to find that this book reminded me of Touch not the Cat-- cousins discovering they love each other, a climax where the lovers are stranded in the middle of an exotic location (in one instance, a hedge maze in the middle of a flood, in the other, an island in the Seraglio garden while the palace goes up in flames), and then of course there are dogs and images of dogs everywhere instead of cats.

The "Gabriel" hounds of the title are a pair of china dogs that Charles admired and nicknamed, which Harriet promised to him (he was always her favorite nephew). As it turns out, this is another variation of the hellhounds of Arawn, like those in Diana Wynne Jones' Dogsbody [read in 2006 by Lark, 2007 by Sapphire]. Harriet also has a pair of Salukis, and missing in action is her beloved terrier Samson, whom Christy and Charles think is dead until they fail to find a grave for him with Harriet's other dogs. And actually, cats figure into the story too, because Christy has an unnatural loathing and fear of cats, and her encounter with one during her interview with Lady Harriet provides Charles with another clue to what is really going on.

A completely entertaining, engaging book. Plenty of danger and adventure, and, of course, love, since Christy and Charles figure out what their family has apparently expected for years (and what the reader probably expects from the first line of the book) figure out that they belong together.

Title:	The Gabriel Hounds
Author:	Mary Stewart
Date published:	1967
Genre:	Romance/Mystery/Adventure ?
Number of pages:	244
Notes:	repeat reading

Read more...

read full post >

Christobel Kershaw is a bit different from most Grace Livingston Hill characters. She comes home from boarding school for her step-mother's funeral, and she is a rather angry young woman, and not sure what she believes in or where she thinks her step-mother has gone now that she's dead. Christobel and her brother Randall are practically strangers from her father because of this woman he married who immediately shipped them away to school and started enjoying her new husband's wealth. Everyone thinks Mr. Kershaw is quite wealthy, but they don't know that his wife was profligate in her spending and his business is starting to founder (I believe this is set near the beginning of the Great Depression). This doesn't prevent his wife's stylish servants from trying to steal all the silver and expensive dresses (Christobel figures this out and helps catch them), and eventually Randall is kidnapped and a ransom is demanded.

In some ways, Christobel is more interesting than many of Hill's other heroines, because of her uncertainty and her questions. However, it seems that Hill only does this in order to have another character share his faith in Christ with her, and the way this is written dragged me out of the story pretty abruptly. There's something similar in the second part of the book, too. Roughly half-way through, the story shifts to the kidnapped Randall who is being kept in a remote cabin in the woods. Randall notices a little book hidden in the chinks of his room, and because it has an endorsement by a famous athlete (not to mention he has nothing else to do), he begins reading it first to himself and then to his captors. The little book is the Gospel of John, which none of them have ever heard before, and they are convicted by it. The Gospel effectively becomes Randall's ransom, because when their hiding place is discovered and they flee, the kidnapper who is ordered to kill Randall lets him go instead, and Randall eventually escapes back to his family.

This is not really much of a romance, and with the plot ingredients it should be a more exciting adventure than it actually turns out to be. Hill seems to be orchestrating the plot and her characters' lack of belief purposely so that she can overtly share her faith through the book, which to my mind makes both the story and the gospel she's attempting to share less engaging. The Gospel being someone's "ransom" in a life-or-death situation is a compelling idea, but it seems to be handled rather clumsily here.

Title:	The Ransom
Author:	Grace Livingston Hill
Date published:	1933
Genre:	Romance/Adventure
Number of pages:	238
Notes:	repeat reading

Read more...

read full post >

The only book I have ever read by Louis L'Amour, and it's not a western. In the height of the cold war, an Air Force test pilot is captured by the Russians; their intent is to question him about the latest American technologies he has tested. What they don't know is that Major Joe Makatozi (aka "Joe Mack") is not only a resourceful officer and a decathlete, but also part Sioux Indian; he was raised learning how to hunt and live off the land, like his people used to do. Joe quickly escapes the isolated Siberian prison and makes his way across Siberia, surviving the winter and the harsh conditions, following the ancient path his ancestors took over the Bering Strait to the Americas.

This book isn't technically a Western-- it's a fairly contemporary, Cold War-era novel that is quite a fun adventure. But in some ways, it feels like my impression of Westerns (not a genre I'm so familiar with). For instance, the good guys and bad guys are very clear cut (although there are plenty of good Russian and Lithuanian characters); Joe's one main concern is the tracker Alekhin, a Yakhut (native Siberian, similar to our American Indians) who is famous for his skill, but also for his cruelty. At one point during the winter, Joe Mack finds a group of dissidents who scrape out an rough existence, trapping for furs to make some money and bribe officials to leave them alone. Joe lives near them for a while, and even connects with a beautiful woman.

Joe Mack is a larger-than-life character: an officer in the Air Force and a nearly olympic-class decathlete, but also an Indian who knows how to make his own bow and arrows, how to trap and hunt animals, treat the furs and leather, and even make his own moccasins. He knows how to travel quickly, leaving very few signs for trackers, and is even clever enough to leave traps behind him for the unwary men following him. At various points in the book, he takes down a bear and even three men in a helicopter with just his bow & arrows. The story seems a little far-fetched, but I also know that there are extraordinary men who can do amazing things (reading the one-page author bio was a reminder that there are men who seem able to do almost anything well).

The title rings true with Joe's sense that his education and civilized demeanor is really just a veneer, and that at heart he is a true "savage" like his ancestors-- in his ability to survive extreme conditions, but also in his identity as a warrior who takes a personal affront to being captured by the Russians. Joe Mack's capability to be savage is brought home in the masterful way the book ends-- L'Amour tells us just enough so that we know how the story ends and gives us some idea of what Joe Mack might do later on.

Title:	Last of the Breed
Author:	Louis L'Amour
Date published:	1986
Genre:	Adventure
Number of pages:	368
Notes:	Second reading

Read more...

read full post >

When I first came across this book, I was mildy interested in it because it was by the author of Blue Moon Rising, which is a marvellous book. It was only later that I learned that the two title characters, Hawk & Fisher, are actually the Prince Rupert and Princess Julia from Blue Moon Rising; they have taken new names and travelled far from the Forest Kingdom, gotten married, and become Captains in the Guard of the city of Haven. It's a little interesting to see the same characters further on in their lives, and in a very different setting... and if you're familiar with the darkness and the demons they've faced before, then you're more likely to understand why they are so capable and unfazed by the horrors of Haven, a city full of corrupt politicians and drug trafficking, alongside wizards and vampires and unfair companies who use zombies to get work done during strikes.

The adventures of Hawk and Fisher are quite fascinating, and will keep you both wondering and enthralled. The first major case is a locked-door mystery with magic involved-- while Hawk & Fisher have an isolation spell to keep all the suspects within a manor house overnight, and a truth-spell to help them track down the murderer, they also have to deal with magical beings and the clever manipulation of magic that was used to accomplish the initial murder. In the second book, Hawk & Fisher are assigned to protect a political candidate for the Reform party-- and end up uncovering plenty of secrets (everyone has at least one). In the third book, Hawk & Fisher have an even stranger murder to solve-- someone has been killing the supernatural beings on the Street of Gods, and they have to figure out who quickly, before all the other beings begin a God War.

The mysteries are all tightly plotted, and the resolutions make complete sense within the world of Haven. Green's writing is not very literary, and sometimes seems a bit formulaic (his description of each new character always seems to be organized the same way, and even the volumes are structured similarly). However, he does have a wry, humorous tone which I find enjoyable.

One oddity: when they took new names, Fisher gave herself a first name, Isobel; but apparently Hawk never chose one (or, at least, we never hear about if he did).

Title:	Swords of Haven: The Adventures of Hawk & Fisher collects Hawk & Fisher (1990), Winner Takes All (1991), and The God Killer (1991)
Author:	Simon R. Green
Date published:	1999
Genre:	Fantasy / Adventure / Mystery
Series:	Hawk & Fisher
Number of pages:	540
Notes:	Repeat reading of Hawk & Fisher

Read more...

read full post >

This book made an impression on me, but maybe not the impression you might think. I found Sahara to be so poorly written, that it made me believe I could be a writer, and sell tons of books, and get them turned into big-budget movies, since I'm pretty sure I can write better than this. Of course, most people probably can.

G and I saw the trailer for the movie based on this book; he'd read the book before, and recognized it with excitement when he saw first saw the trailer for the movie. So, since he already had a copy of the book (an old hard-cover, not the new one pictured here), and I wasn't sure what to read next, he suggested I read this book before the movie came out. As it turns out, we never saw the movie (at least, we haven't yet-- maybe we'll catch it on TV sometime, just for larks, but it's not something I will be going out of our way to see). I've heard the movie was even more poorly written than the book.

I have to admit, the basic premise is fairly interesting, as far as end-of-the-world scenarios go-- this time it is an ecological crisis. Putting the crisis in the midst of African nations in political turmoil certainly ups the ante, and allows for some interesting scenery. For the most part, I tried to just relax and enjoy the ride of this far-fetched adventure, but the writing kept getting in my way. The characters are all very clichéd, and the writing itself is a mish-mash of clichés, and often ones that don't belong together, resulting in some unintentionally humorous mixed metaphors and the like.

There are plenty of moments where this story strains credibility beyond even my limits (and I consider myself a fairly gullible reader). There are two moments in particular that I found to be completely ridiculous. When Dirk and his trusty, able (but not quite as handsome and witty) side-kick are trekking across the desert, the descriptions of their dehydration and exhaustion are extreme and even hyperbolic, as if they are about to keel over dead in any moment (no doubt this is to heighten the sense of their strength and determination); yet, when they find an old prop-plane in a gully they somehow have enough energy & intellect to convert it into a land-yacht. And then, later, when our heroes are under siege, the beautiful and intelligent love-interest (whose life Dirk has saved twice now) manages to find the energy - despite the fact that she was just recently dehydrated, exhausted, and malnourished (how sexy is that?) - and a quiet spot - despite falling bombs and the like - for a quick fling with Dirk.

Sahara did give me a few hours of diversion and entertainment - which I enjoyed, particularly since I was stuck on a plane for some of those hours; but I don't particularly recommend it to readers who actually pay attention to the words and phrases and characters in the books they read.

Title:	Sahara
Author:	Clive Cussler
Date published:	1992
Genre:	Popular Fiction / Adventure
Series:	Dirk Pitt Adventures
Number of pages:	541

Read more...