waiting on wednesday (18)

I’m participating today in "Waiting On" Wednesday. It is a weekly event, hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine, and its purpose is to spotlight eagerly anticipated upcoming releases.

Remember that one time when my heart melted all over a book? No? Well, it did – last year, when I read Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey. It is everything I love best – including Austen-esque and fantastical in nature (and the cover art! gorgeous.). I bought it for my best friend and my sister. I hosted a giveaway out-of-pocket. Basically, I wanted everyone to read it because I ADORE IT. And I feel like the luckiest girl in readingdom, because Kowal has written a sequel, and it comes out next year. Glamour in Glass will be released by Tom Doherty Associates on April 10, 2012.

Mary Robinette Kowal stunned readers with her charming first novel Shades of Milk and Honey, a loving tribute to the works of Jane Austen, set in a world where magic is an everyday occurrence. This magic comes in the form of glamour, which allows talented users to form practically any illusion they can imagine. Shades went on to earn great acclaim, became a finalist for the prestigious Nebula and Locus Awards, and left readers eagerly awaiting its sequel, Glamour in Glass, which continues to follow the lives of beloved main characters Jane and Vincent, with a deeper vein of drama and intrigue.

In the tumultuous months after Napoleon abdicates his throne, Jane and Vincent go to France for their honeymoon. While there, the deposed emperor escapes his exile in Elba, throwing the continent into turmoil. With no easy way back to England, they struggle to escape. But when Vincent is captured as a British spy, Jane realizes that their honeymoon has been a ruse to give them a reason to be in Europe.

Left with no outward salvation, Jane is left to overcome her own delicate circumstances and use her glamour to rescue her husband from prison... and hopefully prevent her newly built marriage from getting stranded on the shoals of another country's war.

What books are you waiting on?

green

I have morphed into an internet shopper. It’s a symptom of the age of technology. Well, that and the fact that I don’t own a car. I do my commuting by bus and metro, on my own two feet, or by hitching a ride with friends. Ergo, I don’t usually shop in brick-and-mortar bookstores. When I actually do go to a bookstore, I can easily get caught up in the wonder of ‘so many new books in one place!’

Let’s recap: physical bookstores are dangerous. I am liable to pick up any pretty book that catches my eye and wander to the cash register with it. I’m not so likely to do that online. In fact, when I shop online I usually search for books I’ve heard about from fellow bloggers (thanks for all the amazing suggestions, by the way!). BUT. I went to a bookstore the other day and actually touched real books, and Green is the one I came away with, despite having never heard of it before that day, and having no recommendation beyond a blurb by Mary Robinette Kowal on the back cover. You’ll remember Ms. Kowal from the insanely awesome Shades of Milk and Honey. Yes, that one.

She was born in poverty, in a dusty village under the equatorial sun. She does not remember her mother, she does not remember her own name—her earliest clear memory is of the day her father sold her to the tall pale man. In the Court of the Pomegranate Tree, where she was taught the ways of a courtesan…and the skills of an assassin…she was named Emerald, the precious jewel of the Undying Duke’s collection of beauties.

She calls herself Green.

The world she inhabits is one of political power and magic, where Gods meddle in the affairs of mortals. At the center of it is the immortal Duke’s city of Copper Downs, which controls all the trade on the Storm Sea. Green has made many enemies, and some secret friends, and she has become a very dangerous woman indeed.

Acclaimed author Jay Lake has created a remarkable character in Green, and evokes a remarkable world in this novel. Green and her struggle to survive and find her own past will live in the reader’s mind for a long time after closing the book.

I haven’t read truly enjoyable first-person narrative in a while. I tend to have a hard time with it – the unreliable narrator issue, flashback scenes and narrowed focus put me off. [insert obvious question: but don’t I read a LOT of YA novels? And aren’t they KNOWN for first person?] Part of the reason I bought this book was that the first two pages were compelling, and Green’s voice was authentic. I felt the dust and the heat, I heard the bells. I could see the scene – almost be a part of it through Green’s eyes – in a way that I haven’t since my experience with the first chapter of Alex Bracken’s Brightly Woven. It had slight shadings of Memoirs of a Geisha, the tiniest of flavors from The Good Earth – mostly in a descriptive sense.

But even as Green succeeded as a first person account of a girl being raised as a courtesan and trained on the side as a fighter, it was uneven in other respects. The book captured a lot of the uncertainty of finding yourself, finding a goal to live for and a way to move forward that happens as a teenager. What it didn’t do was convince me that Green had any emotional connection to other characters (and I know she was meant to). Secondary characters were perforce slighted in stage time, and felt like flimsy paper stand-ins for real people.

The book also contained a lot of ‘mature content.’ Let me be clear: GREEN IS NOT A YA NOVEL. There’s sex, violence, violence AND sex, among other things. Regardless of the moral compass of each character and/or the specific reader, such content can work in a novel, or it can seem out of place and weird. In Green, it worked part of the time, and in other parts felt like a teenage boy’s favorite skeezy dream. I was unimpressed.

Let’s review: Green was really interesting. I read fantasy and science fiction a lot, and yet I haven’t read something like this in a long time, if ever. I read it the whole way through, even though I objected strongly to certain material, and felt that portions of the novel lagged. I contemplated it for days to find out why I reacted negatively sometimes, and why other pieces spoke to me so clearly. In the end, I’d dub it a book I ‘like,’ but not one that I will return to.

Recommended for: those who like their stories a with a touch of the exotic and a strong lashing of dark content, enthusiasts of god/goddess myths in literature, and fans of a strong first-person narrator in an epic fantasy tale.

a little honey for someone else

It’s time to announce the winners of my giveaway for two copies of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey (plus SIGNED bookplates!). Please join me in congratulating...

Christine of The ‘Life’

and TochiO!

If you’ll remember, I asked entrants to give me a word or phrase that reminded them milk and/or honey. Christine wrote, “whenever I think of milk, I get an image of the caramel color it makes when I pour it into my tea.” TochiO said, “I think of what a sunset would taste like if such a thing could be tasted.” Lovely images – in fact, everyone had great contributions. Thanks for letting me sample your imagination!

[photo found here]

If you didn’t win this time, please remember to check out the current giveaway for two copies of Married with Zombies, or to check back later for other opportunities. Thanks again! You = awesome.

shades of milk and honey (+ giveaway)

I found myself proclaiming to my friends that I’d found ‘the perfect book’ yesterday. I didn’t mean that it was THE perfect book for all time and all people. I did mean that I’d found the book that feels as if it was written expressly for me, because it fits my tastes perfectly. And luckily for the rest of you, it’s also well-written, so there’s a chance that you’ll find it just as enchanting as I did.

Shades of Milk and Honey is an intimate portrait of Jane Ellsworth, a woman ahead of her time in a version of Regency England where the manipulation of glamour is considered an essential skill for a lady of quality. But despite the prevalence of magic in everyday life, other aspects of Dorchester’s society are not that different: Jane and her sister Melody’s lives still revolve around vying for the attentions of eligible men.

Jane resists this fate, and rightly so: while her skill with glamour is remarkable, it is her sister who is fair of face, and therefore wins the lion’s share of the attention. At the ripe old age of twenty-eight, Jane has resigned herself to being invisible forever. But when her family’s honor is threatened, she finds that she must push her skills to the limit in order to set things right – and, in the process, accidentally wanders into a love story of her own.

Shades of Milk and Honey is precisely the sort of tale we would expect from Jane Austen…if she had lived in a world where magic worked.

Kowal employs lyrical prose that engages all the senses. I could smell, taste, hear and see the living art contained in her work. Simply put, it is beautiful.

Reviewers are correct in that the setting of Shades of Milk and Honey corresponds to an observation of manners that Austen also featured in her work. It isn’t actually Austen, obviously. It won’t read the same way. But that doesn’t mean that Shades won’t please some Austen fans – it will. It’s reminiscent of Georgette Heyer as well, featuring an elegance of language and phrasing that reminds one of the brilliance of early 20th century minds (and the superiority of their educations).

It is not perfect – no. I don’t want to give anyone such an exalted view that they are let down when they read it for themselves. There are certain plot elements and characters that Austen readers will recognize straight off. But coming to the book as I did from the extremely high praise and recommendation of Elitist Book Reviews (whose taste I trust in almost all matters), I expected beauty, cleverness, and a certain luminous quality. I got all that and more. I felt sublimely entertained and edified at the same time. I feasted my senses and nourished my soul.

But there we go again into sacred territory. Let me explain: it’s perhaps not that it’s SO wonderful, but that it fed two very important parts of me, and a fiction book hasn’t done that in a long time. I’ve most probably been reading the wrong things, or expecting that edification is only the provenance of non-fiction. But it seems to me that good books, really good ones in both an ethical and literary sense, aren’t popular anymore. Modern reads always seem to have something to dissuade me: too much sex, too much violence, a credo or character that I can’t respect. This book skipped the objectionable, but held my interest. It taught me something, but didn’t feel like anything beyond a beautiful pastime while I read it. It was like a well-loved Alcott or L.M. Montgomery tale, without the obvious moralizing.

Oh, and it is so gorgeous! I have cover love to the nth degree, but the words inside and the book design itself…all conspire to make this one of the most beautiful and subtle and yet wonderful things I’ve seen in…ever. The only way I could have loved it more is if there were actual gilded edges. And I’m kind of glad there weren’t, just so that I won’t feel too precious about lending it out. Because this IS the sort of book I will evangelize for without any qualms.

Recommended for: historical fiction and subtle fantasy fans, Regency-era devotees, readers who view Austen as the comfort food of the book world, and anyone looking for a beautiful read with strong art overtones and a classic feel.

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I'm giving away two copies of this book, because I loved it, and I want other people to love it too. Also, when I tried to buy it at Borders I found that they’re not carrying it in stores. Travesty! UPDATE: Author Mary Robinette Kowal is completely awesome and is sending SIGNED bookplates for each winner. Hurrah!

To enter:

Leave a comment on this post with a word or phrase that makes you think of milk or honey. Synonyms, colors, associations, whatever you want – write it down!

Please include a method of contact. Giveaway is open internationally. Comments will close on September 15 at 11:59pm EST, and I will notify the randomly selected winners via email.

Good luck!

teaser tuesday (52)

It's Teaser Tuesday, a bookish blog meme hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Here's how it works:

Grab your current read and let it fall open to a random page. Post two (or more) sentences from that page, along with the title and author. Don’t give anything vital away!

“‘Ah, you see. My sister comes to be my nursemaid and chaperon, as I told you she would.’ She waved and raised her voice. ‘Jane! Do look at what Mr. Vincent is drawing.’”

-p. 72 of Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey