Book Review: The Finisher by David Baldacci

Let me preface this by saying: this is my first time reading David Baldacci; this is David Baldacci’s first time (as far as I know) writing young adult SF/F; and, therefore, this is in no way a review of Baldacci’s larger canon of work, which I have never read and is not of the same genre as this book.

Vega Jane has never left the village of Wormwood – neither has anyone else in the village – until the night she sees her mentor vanish into the dangerous forest that surrounds the hamlet. Behind him, he’s left a series of cryptic clues for Vega to follow – if she can survive long enough to understand them.

I picked up The Finisher because I recognized Baldacci’s name and because someone had mentioned it as a readalike for The Giver. Unfortunately, The Finisher comes nowhere near Lois Lowry’s masterpiece. While it starts in a tone similar to The Giver – isolated village overseen by ruling council – Baldacci quickly starts tacking on subplots. The narrative jolts from dramatic moment to dramatic moment, made more confusing by the fact that Baldacci laces the story with arbitrary invented words (e.g., “session” instead of “year”), some of which are never fully explained. And then he throws in some magic. With no real rules or explanations, the nebulous magic saves (or hurts) various people Because Baldacci Said So whenever Vega Jane can’t think her way out of something.

For all that, the society Baldacci builds is the best thing about the book. The council members are flawed but well-intentioned, being rough doesn’t mean being cruel, and when it occurs, cruelty can be deliberate or unintentional. And I like the idea of fantasy AND dystopia. Unfortunately, Baldacci has not created a successful merger of the two genres.

Book Review: Kinslayer by Jay Kristoff

Kinslayer by Jay Kristoff is the second book of his Lotus War series. I read (and briefly recapped) this book last year and loved it, so naturally I picked up #2 once I heard it was out. (Spoilers for Stormdancer below. You've been warned.)

Alas, Kinslayer suffers from the "link the beginning to the end" syndrome shared by so many other second in the series books. After opening with a brief who's-who (and where they are) refresher, Kristoff adds several new characters to an already substantial cast, including a clanless slum worker and another Guildsman. The plot centers on the Lotus Guild's solution to Shogun Yoritomo's death, their plans against the Kagé, and the Kagé rebellion's attempt to stifle those plans. Unfortunately, I think Kristoff's multi-perspective style has done his plot a disservice here; he seems determined to hop into every significant character's head at least once and quite a number of the minor ones as well. Because of this and the multiple narrative threads he has running simultaneously, the storyline is very jarring, jolting back and forth in time, location, action, etc. Likewise, character development suffers in this book, since we're not in anyone's head but Yukiko's or Kin's long enough to watch them grow. I still love the infusion of Japanese culture and mythology into a steampunk world, but wish he'd kept to a smaller number of perspectives.

Endsinger, the final book in the trilogy, will be out in September 2014 and I do plan to pick it up. Hopefully all the different tendrils Kristoff's got going will reunite into a strong conclusion.

4 Recent Reads

Gentle readers, I am ashamed. I abandoned you for several months because I could not bring myself to tell you this truth: that budget cuts, the bane of libraries everywhere, caught up to me at my lovely new school job. It's probably the hardest job I've ever had to lose, even as I understood why I lost it. But the world has brightened again, and I am re-employed at a bookstore and a local library (both part-time). But the more important questions in life: what's good lately?

The Ascendant by Drew Chapman

Full disclosure: I picked this up at work as an unsolicited ARC and enjoyed myself quite a bit reading it. The Ascendant is a digital age thriller, focused on the possibility of a subtle cyber-financial war in our modern era. I can't say that it was revelatory, but it was fun. Snowy day, stay inside, winter fluff fun. Political machinations are involved, which pleases me. The protagonist actually experiences personal growth over the course of the book, which is even better. A very strong debut novel for Drew Chapman, good enough that I'm passing my ARC along to my father and freely recommending the title at work.


Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen

I picked up Her Royal Spyness (first in a series of six) because my mother looooves Lady Victoria Georgiana - Georgie to her friends. Georgie is thrown headfirst into detective work when she discovers a Frenchman drowned in the bath of her family home. Bowen has a good sense of humor and develops Georgie - a broke demi-royal - fairly nicely, from hapless nobility to vaguely self-sufficient, with a good deal of flailing along the way. I would pass this one along to my friend who loves the Jeeves and Wooster series.

All Through the Night by Suzanne Brockmann

I'll be honest, I wanted to like this book. I really did. I'd read Force of Nature, the book in which protagonists Robin and Jules came to the fore, recently and picked this one up from the Christmas books display at my library. Alas, equal rights include the equal right to mediocre thriller fiction. There's one drama after another after another all barreled through at enormous rates of speed with minimal development. I understand that this is a short-and-sweet interlude sort of book, but I feel like Brockmann had 8 different possible plotlines and, instead of pruning, decided to shove them all in. I'd pass along Force of Nature, but skip this one.


The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale

You couldn't possibly imagine getting through without a re-told fairy tale, could you? Me either. This one ticks all my boxes: strong female protagonist, well-defined magic, political intrigue. Check, check, check. When her lady-in-waiting attempts to assassinate her and seizes her role, Ani must learn to stand on her own two feet, using her talents and wits to prevent her greedy betrayers from throwing two kingdoms into chaos. If you read this and like it, try Hale's Princess Academy series as well. I would pass it along to Rayna, who I think might love re-told fairy tales as much as I do.

So Many Books, So Little Time (to Shelve Them All)

The books arrived last Monday, but first a little perspective on where Square 1 was for me in all this:

If you stare through the display racks, you can see some stray books floating around back on the shelves – a couple of classroom sets (including The Incredible Journey and A Wrinkle in Time), but mostly 25 year old "issues" books.

Boxes of books lined up in the gym

The books all came into the gym, which is why my arms look so much buffer than they did a week ago. For the most part, fiction and non-fiction were in separate boxes, but those boxes were all jumbled together. So the engineering staff and a couple guys from climate control helped me move them all downstairs and get them (mostly) separated into fiction and non-fiction at least.


Where they ended up stacked up all over the place. Most were labeled in a general way: 811, Dre-Dru, enough to let us sort them into fic/non-fic without too much hassle.

And during breaks, I got to hash out the leftovers from the school building's previous tenants. The issues books have been escorted to the trash, especially after cracking one open and finding that it still dated from the days of "having a single mother turns you into a druggie."

I get by with a little help from my friends

I also shamelessly begged help from friends so we could sort the non-fiction boxes down into 100s/200s/etc. Priority for me ended up being the science books, especially the 500s, simply because I (rightly) suspected that they would need the most work & weeding and I wanted to get after them early. According to our collection, alas, Pluto is still a planet and the internet does not exist. Weeding these fully is going to be difficult. I was once advised to draw the line at anything that predates the internet, but that would leave hardly any books in some subject areas. These and issues books are probably going to be where I spend any money I get. The astronomy section is particularly bad. I also discovered my least favorite Dewey number: 595.4 - spiders.

By now, the 500s have overflown the space that was designated as theirs by the previous tenants. For better or worse, I suspect we will not have enough space for all the books we received. The good news is that this encourages me to be more aggressive with my weeding where I can be, to be more generous with teachers' "Ooooh, can I have this for my classroom?" requests, and to allow kids to take more books home with them for longer. I can also probably bring some books over to the other campus. The bad news? Some things that deserve shelf time may not get it.

 Things I Have Learned Include: the last person to have this collection liked fairy tales about as much as I did; petition for volunteers/minions early and often; do not order your books backwards (whoops); talk to other librarians - they will want to help you (to the tune of "here's how you can get $10,000 worth of stuff"). Talk and blog and share and tell everyone you know because people will just give you stuff - lots of stuff - because they want the next generation of readers to have access to the books they loved and learn to love them too. Library school students will volunteer for letters of rec. If you say "I want to do program X," people will say "oh my god, that sounds great, let me give you the number of my friend at the Program X Foundation." Basically, never shut up about your library. Of course, for most library people, that's not a struggle.

Starting to shelve books

Books on the shelves with display racks

The displays with the 398s behind them.

Staff In-Service, Day Five

WE HAVE BOOKS! WE HAVE LOTS OF BOOKS!

Or, rather, we will have books. Amid all the getting to know you exercises and school tours and distribution of classroom materials (dry erase markers and construction paper!), I have received news that we will be receiving around 15,000 books. I actually staggered when my wonderful Director of Curriculum (Ms. Monique Bell) told me the news.

I have no idea when they get here. I have no idea how they were cataloged. I have no idea if I'm receiving 15,000 copies of To Kill a Mockingbird. I really don't care (okay, I don't want 15,000 copies of a single title) because WE HAVE BOOKS! I am going to have an actual library that we can actually use!

Staff In-Service, Day One

Or, the matter of starting a school library from the ground up.

I am finally, delightfully, and gainfully employed in my career of choice: librarianship. (Technically, library specialist, as I have no MLIS.) Beginning with this post, I intend to blog about the challenges and successes of starting a school library from the ground up.

Just as a point of reference, here are some things that might be good for you to know:

- I have very little formal library education, amounting to a single children's literature class in college and a CE course in "Managing the One-Person Library" through Simmons

- However, I have worked as a page at the Oshkosh Public Library in two different departments (Reference & Adult Services - which included Teen - and Tech)

- I have my eye on library school, yes I do.

- My time will be split between two campuses.

- My budget is $0.

In short: At under age 30, I am going to run 2 libraries without an MLIS degree, with substantially less than 5 years of experience and no money at all.

Watch me learn on the fly!


What I'm reading today: Seraphina by Rachel Hartman. Dragon/human politics and political intrigue set in a medieval-ish world with a musical backdrop. Going to try to get this one on my shelves.

Summer Reading: A List

My summer reading list has been a mix of new, newish, and old. I can't imagine that Captain Underpants and Diary of a Wimpy Kid require any more reviews than they've already had (but they were on my reading list, compiled with the help of a second grader). I've been trying to work on bringing myself current with lit for younger kids – you may have noticed that I heavily favored mythology/fairytale-based YA lit. So the idea is to (at least occasionally) break out of that mold.

Code Name Verity by Elizabeth Wein

The intertwined stories of a spy and an Air Transport Auxiliary service member who become friends. After parachuting into France, Verity is caught by the local Gestapo and must bargain for her life. This is her story, and the story of her friendship with the pilot who brought her to France.

So very, very, very good and I am afraid to say more than that. Read this book.




Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli

The story of an orphaned boy looking for a home in the racially divided town of Two Mills, Pennsylvania. I wanted to make a point of including this book on this list because I never read it when I was younger, because everyone knew that it was a sports book because it was by Jerry Spinelli who wrote books about sports, which were for boys. But it's also about home and family and reading and race and How Legends Are Born. It is, in short, worth recommending to just about everyone, regardless of whether or not it is "their kind" of book.

Katya's World by Jonathan Howard

Katya was raised on the Earth colony of Russalka, a distant, storm-tossed waterworld. People live deep beneath the ocean's stormy waves and live off the ocean's resources. Katya is much more interested in her first submarine voyage as a member of the crew. It's supposed to be a routine run until their boat is commandeered to transport a political prisoner.

Political intrigue and a strong female lead? Yes please! Both sides are cast in shades of grey. There is no unnecessary love triangle and there's enough action to satisfy just about anyone. Highly recommended.


The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler

I wanted to like this book. Kessler builds an interesting world in which Emily, who has never been allowed in the water, is finally allowed to take swimming lessons ... and discovers that she's a mermaid. She goes looking for her father and in the process discovers a whole world beneath the sea. Told from a first person perspective, Kessler has the voice of a twelve-year-old down perfectly. Unfortunately, that's where the book loses me. I wish I could enjoy that tone or at least ignore it, but I just can't get into this book.



Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

This book is fighting tooth and nail to be my favorite book of the summer. Instead of diving back into Euro-centric stories, Wilson deftly weaves together Arabic mythology (djinn! Empty Quarter! 1001 Nights!), modern technology, and the events of the Arab Spring into this absolutely brilliant tale. When Alif, a young Arab hacker, falls in love with Intisar, he wants to believe that their relationship has a future. But she is promised to another. As a keepsake, though, she sends him a book: The Thousand and One Days. And Alif's world shifts. When he finds himself pursued by the shah's security forces, Alif seeks allies who may not be quite human. The magic in this book is sneaky. Alif might just be going crazy or becoming dehydrated. Or maybe djinn still walk the world.

The Girl of Fire and Thorns by Rae Carson

Lucero-Elisa, a princess, has been chosen by god to perform a task. When she was born, a Godstone was implanted in her navel, signifying her selection by a higher power. When she is married off, it is because her husband, Alejandro de Vega, needs her to be a savior. His country is in turmoil and war looms on the horizon. Elisa is not sure she's ready to save anyone – but she may not get a choice.

This is not a perfect book. There's some sort of almost romance and the book equivalent of a training montage (Elisa goes into it fat and comes out fit and ready to defend her country). But the politics and the young princess finding her feet and the religious schisms are all fascinatingly believable. It's a strong debut novel and I'm looking forward to picking up The Crown of Embers, next in the series. Two notes: the main character is pretty clearly Hispanic (but in a very nonchalant way) and the religion in question seems to be an alternate universe take on Christianity. The former is great; the latter may be problematic for some readers.