Review: Maybe This Time, by Jennifer Crusie

Jennifer Crusie, formerly a romance novelist, has branched out into the supernatural with her new novel, Maybe This Time, the story of a woman whose ex-husband, North, reaches out for help when he becomes the guardian of two children after the sudden death of their aunt. The catch: the children are wild, and several nannies have already quit the job, claiming that the house is haunted. North is at his wit's end, and offers Andie a large sum of money to take on the job; Andie accepts under the premise that she has debts she wants to pay off before she becomes engaged to another man. Of course, it's no surprise that the two still have strong feelings for one another, and their suppressed emotions come to the forefront as the truth about the old house comes to light.

I will be honest: I did not pick this novel to read on my own; a representative from the publisher (St. Martin's Press) contacted me and asked if I would review an advance copy, and I agreed. Ordinarily, I would probably not have given 'Time' a second glance, and assumed it was *serious* chick-lit based on the cover which, to me, screams romance. However, I'm glad I read it; the storytelling was solid, and while there were relationship threads to the plot, they were not the main focus of the book, which stayed true to its ghostly theme, yet was not grisly or gratuitous. Crusie has written a good, old-fashioned haunting, complete with possessions and banishments, that is enough to keep the reader turning the pages into the night without causing nightmares.

Andie and the children are well-written and believable. The little girl, Alice, is particularly appealing, and as the plot unfolds Andie - and thus the reader - uncover the real roots of her near-psychosis and develop an attachment to her. Carter, her brother, is less developed as a character, but is still interesting. The only person in the story who comes across as a little flat, a little too scripted, is North, but his part of the story is minimal until the last quarter or so, which makes it not as damaging as it could have been otherwise.

All in all, Maybe This Time is an enjoyable, light read that won't leave you with that greasy, mildly guilty feeling that a lot of so-called women's literature does, because it doesn't resort to sex, violence and ridiculous stereotypes to reel readers in; the story is good, and the ending satisfies. I will be passing it on to friends.

Rating: four stars out of five. Fun, well-written, spooky entertainment.

Thanks to St. Martin's Press for providing an advance copy for my reading pleasure!

Review: Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

Cleave's second novel, Little Bee, tells the story of a sixteen year-old girl from Nigeria who has been orphaned by civil brutality.

If you focus on that first sentence closely, you will find the underlying premise of the novel. Little Bee delivers an extraordinary blow to the reader by delving into the painful truth of what happens when two regular, white, European tourists become involved in conflicts they don't understand when they blithely assume that their aura of Privilege will protect them from all that is ugly in the world during a holiday on the African continent. This misconception explodes when they meet Little Bee and her sister, fleeing from oil company soldiers, on a beach. The couple is faced with a choice; one acts, one does not, and the repercussions shower love, disaster, salvation and destruction on all present as the story moves from the Nigerian coast to the quiet suburbs of London.

One of the main themes of the novel is globalization, and the reader is left to ponder exactly what that means. What is globalization, really? Is it the action of incorporating all of humanity into one vast network, a web where we all are linked together in the striving for a better life? Or is it a disguise for colonization and commerce, the process of a powerful few taking what they want from the globe while simultaneously ridding themselves of the politically powerless who stand inconveniently in the way? Can average people have any effect at all? Cleve's focus on these silent questions, and what happens when average people try to intervene, make for a horrifying, beautiful tale that forces the reader to question his or her stance on what it means to be a human in a globally focused world.

Some of the scenes in Little Bee are quite graphic, particularly during the girl's tale of what happened on that beach after the couple, Sarah and her husband, Andrew, escape back to the resort. While awareness that these events are indicative of real horror around the world is important, readers should be ready to skim through that short chapter if necessary; those forging ahead should be prepared to be confronted with true nightmare.

Cleve tells the story through two alternating voices, those of Sarah and Little Bee, each revealing their particular perspective on events as tempered by their own cultural interpretation. Sarah is overwhelmed by guilt, regret, loss, and concern over her young son, whose own childish guilt and fear make him insist on dressing as Batman every day so he can fight off the 'baddies'. Little Bee looks at events through the lens of an outsider, one who tragically views every situation by first considering how she could kill herself should soldiers show up in the area. While Sarah is older in years, Little Bee is by far the older soul, and as the novel funnels downward, it is she who learns acceptance and ultimately acquiesces to fate, while Sarah struggles ever increasingly, like a fish caught in a net of naivete, tighter and tighter. Their ultimate return to the beach is the inevitable flowering of a poisonous plant.

Rating: SIX STARS out of five. Read this book.

Review: Jane Slayer, by Charlotte Bronte and Sherry Browning Erwin

Yet another in the genre of classic-horror stories, Jane Slayre (a clever play on words for Jane Eyre) comes to us bearing not only vampires, but zombies and werewolves as well, woven cleverly - and nearly seamlessly - into the original plot.

For those of you unfamiliar with Bronte's solo version, Jane is an orphan, adopted by a nasty aunt who already has three unpleasant children. She is sent to a private school for orphans, and eventually leaves there as an adult to work as a governess for the wealthy Mr. Rochester, with whom she falls in love and, in true romantic fashion, marries after the usual trials and tribulations. The fun differences here are that the aunt's family are vampires, there are zombies at the school, and Mr. Rochester has a very hairy secret hanging out in his attic. Jane, true to her name, is a slayer, and deals quite handily with all that come her way.

Erwin does an excellent job in maintaining Bronte's tone and affection for the characters while still giving them their edgier personas. The entire original story is still present, just with alternative explanations for events and far funnier additional subject matter. As is usual in these literary remodels, the more gory portions of the story are told in subdued ways that remain true to the language of the period, and are not for those looking for current-day horrors. They are brief, drolly amusing, and if anything, remind me slightly of (stay with me, here) the scene in the original Shrek movie, where Fiona dispenses with all of the bandits in the forest, smooths back her hair, and walks gracefully off. The characters are very laissez-faire about events, which adds to the humor while simultaneously sparing the reader the tiresome period where the characters discover that there is an infestation of some particularly unappetizing beast in their midst; they all readily accept that these creatures are among them, and act accordingly. What makes these novels so funny is that the characters will be going along, acting in their Victorian way, then suddenly bust out with swords (and heads) flying, and afterward simply tidy up the mess and continue on with their uptight lives. Normal dinner conversation entails bonnets, the neighbor's new carriage, and how best to remove stains made by the green zombie slime. No big whoop.

The one drawback to the novel is that, of course, Erwin is held to the original main plot - that of Young Girl Mooning Over Moody Older Man. However, the up side is that the addition of various unmentionables has vastly improved this sometimes tiresome theme by adding spice to what was originally a rather drawn-out dance. Also, even the original Jane had quite a bit of spunk, much more so than other women in similar novels, and these new additions supply her with different areas in which to branch out. Erwin has done her a service.

Rating: five stars. Witty, well-woven adaptation of a classic.

Review: Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, by Amanda Grange

Those of you who stop by here frequently know that I love the new genre of classic-horror hybrid novels. They're witty, wry, and a fun way to catch up on the classics without losing the real story-as-intended by the original author when used as a basis for the new story, or, when written as an entirely stand-alone entity, as Seth Grahame-Smith's Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter, an entertaining way of turning history on its head.

Not this time.

Mr. Darcy, Vampyre, is indeed a tragedy, and not in the usual literary fashion. It starts out with some promise, but quickly turns into a sort of harlequin romance, with Elizabeth Bennett Darcy playing the part of the idiot heroine, a complete departure from her 'actual' generally intelligent character. Mr. Darcy is shown to be a man-with-a-secret, brooding and semi-tortured. Grange manages to reduce the entire story of their romance to the Twilight series status; indeed, the book might have been more enjoyable had I gone through the entire thing and whited-out everyone's names and replaced them with those from that lesser series! At least then I wouldn't have had my hopes up.

To spare you from reading the thing yourself, here is a quick synopsis: right from the wedding day, Elizabeth notices that Darcy is acting strangely unhappy, and begins to feel that she herself is somehow to blame. When Darcy leaves her alone on their wedding night, and every night thereafter, she miserably writes letters to her sister, Jane, lamenting her predicament. Because the two have just married, they are on their honeymoon tour, traveling in Europe, and Darcy introduces Elizabeth to hundreds of people, all of whom have a strange, sinuous, overtly sexual presence, and who make many exclamations over their marriage, declaring that it will never work, so on and so forth, while never saying completely out loud that the problem is not Elizabeth's lack of personal fortune, as she assumes, but rather that he is a vampire. The troubles culminate when Darcy drags Elizabeth to a remote castle, on a road that is surrounded by red-eyed wolves and strange noises, to see a 'relative' who will help him with a 'personal matter'. Upon entering the castle, the staff all start screaming and carrying on in a 'strange language' because an axe falls off the wall just as the couple walk under it, almost killing them. This castle, which has no mirrors, does, however, have a painting of two men who look suspiciously like Darcy and this relative, from long ago. Within days, there is an angry mob storming the castle with torches, and the hapless Bennett, still cluelessly lamenting her virginity, is dragged through an underground tunnel, and over mountains, on a mule to escape. She STILL has no idea what's going on. Seriously. Her main role, all this time, has been to internally freak out, a la Twilight's Bella, about how to get Darcy to come into her bedchamber at night and 'make her his wife'.

I'm not going to tell you any more, because it's too depressing and, frankly, boring. The only reason I finished the book at all was so I could come here and say with honesty that it gets no better. The eventual resolution is no better than the rest. The only use for this novel would be as the basis for one of those Scary Movie series films; that would actually be pretty good. This author has written several other classic literature sequels, which I have not read, that focus on the male character's diary and seem to have been better received according to their reviews on Amazon; my thought is that she threw this particular tale out there in an attempt to cash in on the classic-horror genre as well without first thinking whether she should, or more importantly, *could*.

Rating: Bleh.

Review: Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Shilpi Gowda's first novel, Secret Daughter, is the beautiful, interwoven tale of two sides of international adoption.

Kavita, a poor Indian woman from a small rural village, gives birth in a hut at dawn with the knowledge that if this child is again a girl, it will suffer the same horrible fate at the hands of her husband, who looks only for a son, as her last child. Hours later, Kavita, her sari bloodied from her fresh birthing wounds, travels on the back of a trader's cart to distant Bombay to leave her daughter, with only a name and a small silver anklet, in the arms of an orphanage director. Thousands of miles away, Somer, an American doctor, has just suffered her third miscarriage. A year later, their lives are inextricably linked when Somer and her husband, an Indian-born doctor, adopt Kavita's baby.

Over the next twenty years, Secret Daughter is told from several points of view. At first, Kavita and Somer are the primary focus, but as daughter Asha grows into a young girl, her voice is included as well. Others, such as Somer's husband and her mother-in-law, make only a few appearances, as does Kavita's husband, but this makes them no less important; one chapter told by Jasu was, for me, the most emotionally devastating in the novel. The entire tale is at once heartbreaking and stirring, with the current of loss flowing throughout; Kavita never recovers from the loss of her two girls, while Somer struggles with feelings of inadequacy brought on by her infertility and a sense of being the outsider in her own small family, her husband's family, and the entire culture they represent. Asha struggles with the loss of her birth parents and country, and Sarla, Somer's mother-in-law, deals with the loss of her son to a foreign wife and country. All the characters suffer in silence, much to the detriment of everyone involved, and it is only when all the hurt is allowed to reach the surface that each character can let go of the past and embrace a joint future.

Gowda delves deeply into the issues of love and cross-culturalism, revealing raw truths about the difficulty of attempting to mesh different ideals and expectations. For the most part, this is done exceptionally well. The characters are believable and easy to attach to, Kavita in particular. Her agony is palpable, and over the years as her thoughts return again and again to the child she left behind the reader can feel her pain radiating out of the novel. Somer's insecurities, and Asha's yearning for the nearly unknowable about her past also reach out beyond the pages, but in a slightly flatter way. The resolution between Somer and Sarla is a bit too easy and predictable, but this is made up for by a final chapter with Jasu that simply bores its way into the soul. The novel ends with where it begins, in a beautiful revolution that binds all the characters into eternity.

Rating: Five stars. A lovely, deeply emotional work that stirs the imagination and soul.