Library Mama

Well, the cover sure cued me in even if the title hadn’t… I picked up this book not for a romance, but because the series was in a short list in Booklist called, “Heroines Who Kick Butt.” And how could I resist that?

A Kiss of Fate by Mary Jo Putney Great Britain, early 18th century. Gwynne Owens is a young member of the secret magical group called the Guardians, who use their magic to preserve the peace as much as possible. She herself doesn’t have any sign of power, but is a librarian and a serious student of Guardian lore. When the action begins to heat up, she is a young and wealthy widow, living with her much older Guardian sister-in-law. Then she meets Duncan Macrae, a powerful Scottish weather mage. Their attraction is both powerful and frightening to Gwynne (nothing like a few lightening bolts to heat things up), and an early kiss leaves her with vivid visions of violent destruction. She wants to run the other way as fast as she can, but the Guardian Council senses that she will be crucial to balancing Duncan’s power during the gathering uprising in Scotland. After a hasty wedding, the pair is off on a short wedding tour on the way to the Macrae manor in the lowlands of Scotland. And now Gwynne’s power is awakened – truly high levels of seduction, charm, and persuasiveness, with some pretty good future reading to boot. Just quiet female powers, really, she thinks – will they be enough to keep Duncan from adding his power to the uprising and causing the rivers of blood in her visions? Though the Guardian premise seems promising to me, magic in Scotland during the ‘45 says Outlander to me. That series really sets the bar as far as combining adventure, romance and magic, even getting kudos for appealing to both genders, and this one can’t quite meet it. Kiss of Fate a fine book, a little heavier on the romance than the adventure, and a lot more sex than your average romance, due to the heroine’s special powers. It still has a scholarly and adventurous seductress, and a kilt-wearing man whose kisses cause storms. If these are up your alley, give it a try.

Well… it’s been a month or two since my last post. I have been working madly on running the teen area – a full time job – on top of my own. Now that a real sub has been hired, I should have more time again, except for all of the work that I didn’t get done before. So (over the course of several days, I expect), I’ll try to do a super-condensed version of all the books I’ve been reading. Here's a first go:

Keys to Interfaith Parenting by Iris Yob This book starts from the refreshing premise that everyone has faith in something, even if it’s cynicism. It includes short summaries of some major world religions, followed by possible approaches to interfaith parenting. As opposed to the last book on interfaith parenting I read, this book says it’s important for children to learn about the faiths of both parents, even when they’re being raised as one.

The End: Hamburg 1945 by Hans Erich Nossack A moving and poetic first-hand account of the bombing of Hamburg. Less a lecture on the evils of war than a look at the psychology of first-hand traumatic change.

Bring Me the Head of Oliver Plunkett by Colin Bateman A comic caper for teens, as an orphan and a couple of would-be gangsters try to find the stolen head of Ireland’s most beloved saint.

Becoming the Parent You Want to Be by Laura Davis and Janis Keyser This is the practical companion to Unconditional Parenting. Where that book was heavy on rhetoric and research and short on actual practical technique, this one is full of practical guidelines for working with your children to help them become good people. They talk about things like how to incorporate your values into your family and how to teach young children conflict resolution. It’s full of first-hand stories from families of all different types.

I told you it was so, and here it is: a couple of real written for grown-ups, not about babies books.

The Tea House on Mulberry Street by Sharon Owens Confession: I feel at times that I lack real grown-up literary appreciation skills. When I’m reading for pleasure, as long as either characters or plot are good, I’m OK with some other aspect being a little off. This book, though, made me revise my opinion of my literary evaluation skills upward a little. I read a review that said that the characters were a little wooden, the plot a little contrived, but all in all cute. I figured I’d still enjoy it, and the thought of a nice cosy Irish book was really appealing. The book follows the owners and customers of a small tea house in Belfast, with chapters devoted to different characters. The characters are highly stereotyped – the owner of the café, Penny, who really wants a baby but feels trapped by her husband, Daniel, who is neurotically stingy and doesn’t want to focus on anything but the business. There’s a starving artist, two self-righteous old ladies, and lots and lots of people looking for love and finding their current relationship not working for them. They are described in such a way that I couldn’t tell at first if the reader was supposed to like them or laugh at them, and I never did care terribly much what happened to them, though in the end, even the least sympathetic characters got happy endings. It was mildly entertaining, and I guess it did quite well in Ireland. I’ll try the new Alexander McCall Smith book, about residents of a boarding house in Scotland.

The Gilded Chamber: A Novel of Queen Esther by Rebecca Kohn Esther has always been a fascinating figure for me – I was always drawn to stories of women strong enough to find a place in the overwhelmingly male world of the Bible, and Esther is the only woman to have a whole book named after her. Brief plot summary: the King, having banished his previous wife, decides to annex every beautiful virgin in the kingdom, in hopes of forgetting his pain or something. Esther, a Jew, is taken and ends up being chosen as Queen, a powerful but still precarious position. Eventually, she uncovers a plot to destroy all the Jews, the King not knowing that she is one herself. I’m not sure that it’s quite as good as The Red Tent, the book to which it will inevitably be compared. It is similar in its women-centric view of a patriarchal society, and I think Kohn had a little more of a challenge working with the more structured Biblical story. It’s sometimes hard to believe that Esther can be as naïve as she claims and yet act with such political acumen. The story is really beautifully written and well worth reading.