No Time Like The Past - Jodi Taylor

   2015; 376 pages.  Book 5 (out of 14) in the series “The Chronicles of St. Mary’s”.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Time Travel; Humorous Fantasy; Historical Fiction, Romance.  Overall Rating: 10*/10.

 

    The good news: The Institute of Historical Research Department at St. Mary’s Priory is alive and well.  That’s a miracle since in the previous book chronicled a vicious attack by the Time Police on St. Mary’s.

 

    The bad news: That attack was repulsed, but not without massive damage and several deaths.  Repairs and replacements cost a lot of money, and Thirsk University, St. Mary’s employers and purse-holders, rightfully expect a return on their investment.  The time-traveling historians at St. Mary’s desperately need to perform a spectacular, and financially lucrative, jaunt into the past.

 

    Madeleine “Max” Maxwell has come up with a promising plan.  Hop back a couple centuries, acquire some items that would/will make great “artifacts” after a couple hundred years, and bury them in a secure place.  Zip back to the present, show Thirsk University where to dig, and let them be showered in glory for finding a trove of valuable relics.

 

    What could go wrong?  Well, there’s a reason why this plucky team of chrono-hopping historians is called “the disaster-magnets of St. Mary’s”.

 

What’s To Like...

    No Time Like The Past is the fifth book in Jodi Taylor’s time-travel-with-historical-fiction-with-romance  "Chronicles of St. Mary’s" series.  I’ve been reading the books in order, and so far they’ve all been wonderful reads.  There are five time-jumps in this book, which is about average, and all to awesome time-space sites in the past.  The main one here is a visit to Thermopylae in 480 BCE to watch the 300 Spartans hold off the massive Persian army for several critical days.

 

     I was impressed by the attention to detail the author pays to each of the historical sites.  The descriptions of the settings really added to their “realness”, and I learned interesting history facts such as the name of the guy who betrayed Leonidas and the Spartans (Ephialtes of Trachis).  The details concerning another time-trip, this time to Florence in 1497 CE for an event called The Bonfire of the Vanities, were just as fascinating, and timely as well, since I just recently read Tom Wolfe’s novel by that name.

 

    In addition to all that chrono-hopping, there's a fair amount events going on at St. Mary’s here.  Max (Chief Operations Officer) and Tim Peterson (Chief Training Officer) swap jobs, meaning both have new duties to learn.  A “friendly” boat-building contest with Thirsk personnel is proposed, accepted, and taken very seriously by both entities.  And on the Romantic front, Leon and Max prepare to take the next step in their relationship.

 

    The book, and the series, are written in English, as opposed to American, which I always find to be a treat.  Besides the usual variances in spelling, I needed to look up the “translations” of the following phrases: pulling your plonker, jacket potatoes, pissed as a newt, toad in the hole, priest hole, and spotted dick.  Have fun researching these, and get your mind out of the gutter on those last two.

 

    There's lots of trivia sprinkled throughout the text.  I learned what the acronym “ASBO” stands for, the etymology of the word “bankrupt”, and the definition of “swive”.  A few puns are also woven into the tale, to which I can only say, “that’s offal”.

 

    The ending was not what I expected, which is always a plus.  But it’s both logical and a bit humorous.  The final chapter addresses the romance storyline, and closes with an amusing epilogue.  No Time Like The Past is told in the first person POV (Max’s), and is both a standalone book and part of a series.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.6*/5, based on 7,326 ratings and 606 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.36*/5, based on 11,143 ratings and 662 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    “For God’s sake, Max, look at this place.  “Look out there.”  I rolled over and looked at the screen.  “It’s total devastation.  We’re going to be paying for this lot for the rest of our lives.  I’m going to have to have at least forty kids to inherit the debt.”

    Fortunately, at that moment, Mr. Lindstrom’s voice came over the com.  “Max? Markham?  Can you hear me?”

    “Tell them I’m dead,” said Markham, making no move to get up off the floor.

    “I’m fine, but Markham says he’s dead.”  (pg. 150)

 

    “Hold on,” I said.  “Were you studying tactics and things at—what do they call it—officer school?”

    “Not for very long.”

    “You surely didn’t set fire to that as well?”

    “No, of course not,” he said, wounded to the core.  “Not the whole thing.  It’s a big place, you know.”

    “So just a small corner of it?”

    “Barely even that.  Just a few rooms.  Maybe a bit of corridor.  There was plenty of building left so I don’t know why they made such a fuss.”  (pg. 308)

 

“Just think about it—being killed by your own wedding present.  How bizarre would that be?”  (pg. 305)

    No Time Like The Past rates a rare 10-Star rating, so unsurprisingly, the quibbles are microscopic.  I counted ten instances of cussing in the first 20% of the book (75 pages) equally split between an excretory function and the Underworld.  Later, there’s a roll-in-the-hay, and a reference to boobs.  All of this was tastefully done.

 

    A couple of typos also showed up along the way: Pa Lace/Palace, top/stop, Lies’/Lies, hear/head, and ally/allay.  These were all in the paperback version, so they can’t be blamed on the printed-to-digital conversion.  They caused my editor’s mind to stumble a bit, but weren’t numerous enough to where it became a distraction.

 

    But I pick at nits.  I’m now 5/14 through this series, and the storyline in No Time Like The Past felt just as “fresh” as those for each of the earlier books.  I don’t know how Jodi Taylor selects the chrono-hopping destinations for the plucky historians at St. Mary’s, but they're always fascinating, and I’m eager to see where they get sent in the next book, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

 

    10 Stars.  One last helpful hint about the oft-pondered time-travel enigma of “can I go back in time and shoot myself?”  St. Mary’s has an ironclad rule that bans any of their historians from chrono-hopping back to place where there is a possibility of “meeting yourself”.  If such a situation should arise, one's fellow St. Mary’s operative has orders to shoot to kill the “modern you”.

The Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson

   1990; 245 pages.  Full Title: The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Linguistics; Reference; English Language - History; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating : 10*/10.

 

   When you get right down to it, English is a poor choice for a global language.  Oh, there are worse ones, such as Mandarin Chinese which has thousands upon thousands of ideographs that you pretty much have to just memorize.  Or Basque, which has almost no words in common with any other tongue.

 

    There’s also well-intended things like Esperanto, foremost amongst about a half dozen artificial languages that were created with the intent of convincing the whole world (literally) to use them as a global tongue.  The problem is that they have zero native speakers, so you’re basically asking every person on Earth to learn a second language.

 

    So maybe English is not such a bad choice, despite the British and the Americans having different words for the same thing, different ways to spell words we have in common, different accents, and a different set of idioms to contend with, including the unfathomable Cockney rhyming.

 

    Perhaps it would behoove us to study up on the English language: learn its history, its subtleties, its variances, and its abundant inconsistencies.

 

    In other words, let’s read Bill Bryson’s fantastic book, The Mother Tongue.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Mother Tongue is divided into 16 chapters, namely:

01. The World’s Language

    An overview.  English’s strengths and weaknesses.

02. The Dawn of Language

    Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons.  Pidgins and Creoles.

03. Global Language

    Various “Endangered” Languages.

04. The First Thousand Years

    From 450 AD to Shakespeare.

05. Where Words Come From

    Five different ways that words come into being.

06. Pronunciation

    It changes over time.

07. Varieties of English

    Dialects.

08. Spelling

    Weird spellings in English.  Spelling reform movements.

09. Good English and Bad

    How “proper” grammar is constantly changing.

10. Order Out of Chaos

    The history of dictionaries.

11. Old World, New World

    American vs. British English.  Cross-pollination.

12. English as a World Language

    Global mangling of English.  Esperanto.

13. Names

    Nobles, Streets, Pubs, Surnames, and Places.

14. Swearing

    Including euphemisms and etymology.

15. Wordplay

    Crossword puzzles, and other linguistic pastimes.

16. The Future of English

    Featuring the “English only” movement.

 

    I usually mark my favorite chapters in pink, but here, I loved them all.  Chapters 1-7 are the history of the English language, Chapters 8-10 focus on how grammar evolved, and Chapters 11-16 are an assortment of “fun” linguistic aspects of English.

 

    I was raised in Pennsylvania Dutch country, so I loved seeing that dialect getting some ink, ditto for the nearby town named “Intercourse”.  The section on the Basque language also resonated with me, since I read a Mark Kurlansky book about them earlier this year.  The review is here.

 

    The book is chock full of trivia and obscure facts.  The oldest sentence we have that was written in (early) English is “This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman” and it's anatomically accurate to say you are capable of speaking because you can choke on food.  Interestingly, the traffic term “roundabout” was coined by an American living in Britain and replaced the clunkier phrase “gyratory circus.”

 

    The grammar sections were fascinating.  The esoteric and unintended word “Dord” was mentioned, and it was fun to see verb options such as dived/dove, sneaked/snuck, strived/strove, and wove/weaved are still a “whichever you want to use” sort of thing.

 

    The “fun” chapters were . . . well . . . lots of fun!  The full gamut of topics there is: crossword puzzles, Scrabble, palindromes, anagrams, lipograms (huh?), acrostics, rebuses, holorimes (what?), clerihews (say again?), spoonerisms, amphibology (oh, come on, now), and Cockney rhyming.

 

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.4/5 based on 3,299 ratings and 1,372 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.91/5 based on 39,484 ratings and 3,026 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    There is an occasional tendency in English, particularly in academic and political circles, to resort to waffle and jargon.  At a conference of sociologists in America in 1977, love was defined as “the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.”  That is jargon—the practice of never calling a spade a spade when you might instead call it a manual earth-restructuring implement—and it is one of the great curses of modern English.  (pg. 19)

 

    The combination “ng,” for example, is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in bring and sing.  But in fact we make two sounds with it—employing a soft “g” with singer and a hard “g” with finger.  We also tend to vary its duration, giving it fractionally more resonance in descriptive and onomatopoeic words like zing and bong and rather less in mundane words like something and rang.  We make another unconscious distinction between the hard “th” of those and the soft one of thought.  (pg. 87)

 

Imposing Latin rules on English structure is a little like trying to play baseball on ice skates.  (pg. 16)

    Frankly, I can’t find anything to grouse about in The Mother Tongue.  There are some cusswords, but that’s a given since there’s a whole chapter devoted to swearing, and it was enlightening to learn that the F-bomb is not an acronym of “For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge”.

 

    It was therefore somewhat surprising to see its relatively low rating at Goodreads (3.91/5).  Most of the criticism there was about perceived inaccuracies detected about some of the non-English languages Bryson mentions.

 

    For instance, one reviewer was upset by Bryson’s assertion that the Finnish language contains no swear words, and gave several examples to disprove this.  Admittedly, my knowledge of Finnish is zilch, I suspect Bryson’s is close to that level also, so he was most likely relying on some Finnish-speaking expert's “facts”.  But let's get real now; this book isn’t about the Finnish tongue.  The low rating given by this reviewer is unmerited, and, to misquote Hamlet, “methinks he doth protest too much”.

 

    For me, The Mother Tongue was a thoroughly enlightening and educational read.  This was my eighth Bill Bryson book, but others were all either in the Historical or Travel genres.  It’s great to discover he’s just as skilled when it comes to writing a book about Linguistics.

 

    10 Stars.  We’ll close with an old children’s riddle which Bill Bryson says comes close to being an example of a holorime: “How do you prove in three steps that a sheet of paper is a lazy dog?”

      The answer is posted in the comments.

The Complete Maus - Art Spiegelman

   1997; 296 pages.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Graphic Novel; Biography; Holocaust History; Non-Fiction.  Laurels: 1992 Pulitzer Prize: “Special Award in Letters” (winner), 10 other awards won plus 2 other award nominations (listed at Wikipedia).  Overall Rating: 10*/10.

 

    What was it like to live under the iron fist of Nazi Germany before and during World War 2, aka “The Holocaust”?

 

    Unfortunately, six million Jews, plus millions of Poles, Russians, gypsies, and Communists are unable to give an answer, since they perished in the concentration camps and ghettos, being beaten, shot, starved, and gassed to death.  To find out what it was like, it’s necessary to find those few who beat the odds and somehow survived.

 

    Art Spiegelman is an Jewish-American cartoonist, artist, and editor.  He had an “in” when it comes to researching the Holocaust: his father, Vladek Spiegelman, was a survivor, not only of the pre-war Jewish ghettos in Poland, but also the death camps of Auschwitz, Dachau, and several more.

 

    In 1978, Art began interviewing his dad, with the result being Maus, both the history of the Holocaust and Vladek’s biography, rendered in graphic novel format, and serialized from 1980 to 1991.

 

    Oh, and banned by a Tennessee school district earlier this year because it contains “profanity, violence, and nudity”.  Of course that caused it to become an instant bestseller, in such high demand that it took Amazon three months to be able to ship me a copy.

 

What’s To Like...

    There are two main storylines in The Complete Maus.  The first, biographical, is the recounting of Vladek’s hellish Holocaust years, where the tasks of staying alive and keeping one’s family alive, were almost impossible to achieve.  The second, autobiographical involves the present-day strained father/son relationship between Vladek and Art, as the latter tries to coax out his dad’s painful WW2 memories while trying to live up to papa’s expectations, an almost impossible combination to achieve.

 

    The Complete Maus combines two volumes published earlier by Art Spiegelman: Maus I – My Father Bleeds History, and Maus II – And Here My Troubles Began.  It’s done in graphic novel format, which is very unusual for a work of non-fiction.  Timeline-wise, Art’s arrival at the Auschwitz death camp is the dividing line between Maus I (1986) and Maus II (1992).

 

    The artwork is in black-and-white, with little shading, and in a “minimalist” style: eyes, for instance, are nothing more than dots.  The characters are rendered as heads of animals atop humanoid bodies.  The choice of animal identifies its type: Jews are mice, Germans are cats, Poles are pigs, Americans are dogs, French are frogs, Swedes are reindeer, Roms are gypsy moths, and Red Cross workers are birds.  The book cover shows Hitler as a cat, but I don’t recall his image appearing in the text itself.

 

    I got a nice “feel” for Jewish home life, and learned some interesting Yiddish vocabulary that was sprinkled throughout.  A couple examples are given below, plus there’s the ever-so-popular “Oy gevalt!”

 

    I was impressed by the story’s evenhanded approach to characters.  Vladek may be the protagonist, but a strain of racism runs through him.  He is not so much heroic as pragmatic, he’ll do whatever needs to be done to stay alive, including bribery, black-marketing, and occasionally cozying up to Germans.  Art renders himself with equal objectivity – the tenseness in the father/son relationship is just as much his fault as Vladek's.

 

    The main reason for reading The Complete Maus, obviously, is to experience the Holocaust.  In this respect, the book succeeds superbly.  The reader experiences the hopelessness and helplessness that millions of Jews felt when they were trapped in Nazi-held lands.  Vladek and other Jews don’t just instantly go from living normal lives to dreading a trip to the gas chamber.  It was a gradual process, carried out one outrage at a time by the Nazis.

 

    The ending is an oxymoron: a happy tearjerker.  To say more would entail giving spoilers.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.8/5 based on 8,029 ratings and 1,489 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.55/5 based on 177,310 ratings and 10,687 reviews

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Nu (n., Yiddish) : an interjection that can mean a number of things, including “Well/”, “So?”, “Come on.”, and “Go on.”

Others: Gefilte Fish (n., culinary); Meshugah (adj., Yiddish).

 

Excerpts...

    One time a day they gave a soup from turnips.  To stand near the first of the line was no good.  You got only water.  Near the end was better – solid things to the bottom floated.

    But too far to the end it was also no good.  Because many times it could be no soup anymore.

    And one time each day they gave to us a small bread, crunchy like glass.  The flour mixed with sawdust together – we got one little brick of this what had to last the full day.

    And in the evening we got a spoiled cheese or jam.  If we were lucky a couple times a week we got a sausage big like two of my fingers.  Only this much we got.

    If you ate how they gave you, it was just enough to die more slowly.  (pg. 209)

 

    In the morning they chased us to march again out, who knows where.  It was such a train for horses, for cows.  They pushed until it was no room left.  We lay one on top of the other, like matches, like herrings.

    I pushed to a corner not to get crushed.  High up I saw a few hooks to chain up maybe the animals.

    I still had the thin blanket they gave me.  I climbed to somebody’s shoulder and hooked it strong.  In this way I can rest and breathe a little.

    This saved me.  Maybe 25 people came out from this car of 200.  (pg. 245)

 

“It was nothing to eat, and nothing to do, only to wait and to die.”  (pg. 253)

    The Complete Maus was a fantastic read for me, so coming up with quibbles is difficult.  The art style is admittedly “spartan”, but I think that adds to the only stark tone of the message.  There was nothing pretty about living through the Holocaust, and if you were shipped off to Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, Dachau, or Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Vladek spent time in all these death camps), it was pretty much assured that you were going to die in the near future.

 

    Some critics disliked the using of animals to denote ethnic identity.  I suppose if I were a Pole, I wouldn’t appreciate them being typecast as pigs.  Ditto for the French being rendered as frogs.  But I don’t think Art Spiegelman was intending racial slurs by this.  In his minimalist style, he’s making it easy for the reader to figure out what nationality any given character is.

 

    I'll give The Complete Maus a rare 10-star rating.  Its portrayal of the horrors of the Holocaust is bone-chilling.  Maus won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the only graphic novel ever to do so.  This should be required reading in every high school or college class teaching  20^th Century History.

 

    10 Stars.  One final exercise: let's evaluate the McMinn Country Schools decision to remove The Complete Maus from its shelves.

    Profanity.  I counted 16 instances in the entire book, mostly scatological or eschatological terms.  That’s remarkably clean.

    Violence.  There are corpses.  There was a war going on.  At one point, prisoners are burned alive.  The Holocaust was by nature inhumanely violent.  To depict it otherwise would be a lie.

    Nudity.  I only recall two times (pgs. 185/86 and 218).  Both involve only adult male prisoners, and both were drawn in the author’s minimalist style.  If these offend you, or worse yet, arouse you, seek professional help.

A Second Chance - Jodi Taylor

   2014; 382 pages.  Book 3 (out of 13) in the series “The Chronicles of St. Mary’s”.  New Author? : No.  Genres: Time Travel; Humorous Fantasy; Historical Fiction; Romance.  Overall Rating: 10*/10.

 

    Madeleine “Max” Maxwell's proposed trip to Troy has just been approved by the board of St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research!  It’s a journey she’s been wanting to take all her life.

 

    I can relate, I’ve always wanted to go see Troy, too.  It’s an archaeological treasure trove found in 1871 by Heinrich Schliemann, and the main subject of Homer’s classic The Iliad, and until Schliemann unearthed its ruins, Troy was generally regarded as a merely a myth.

 

    But Max’s trip will be even more fantastic, because she won't be visiting the ruins.  She’s not just a historian, she’s also a time-traveler, and she’s going to do the time-warp back to Troy when the Trojan War was going on, to witness how the fall of Troy actually went down and hopefully separate fact from legend.  Max has high hopes that this will be a once-in-a-lifetime event for her.

 

    But be careful what you wish for, Max.  When the gods want to curse someone, they sometimes make their fondest wish come true.

 

What’s To Like...

    If you think time-travel novels should have lots of chrono-hopping, you‘re going to love A Second Chance.  There are eight time-jumps, including two to ancient Troy, the first to scout the area, the second to hopefully witness the tragic Fall.  The other six jumps are all to various points in the past; and range in importance from civilization-impacting events to taking part in a hilarious sporting pastime called a cheese-rolling contest.

 

    Jodi Taylor is English, which means the book is written in English, not American, and I'm always fond of this.  Odd-sounding terms abound, some of which are listed below, but which also include food-related terms such as “Toad-in-the-Hole”, “Marmite”, and “toxic honey”.  The first two look yummy, the third one is potentially deadly.

 

    A Second Chance is the third book in the series, which I am reading in order.  So far, each tale is told from the first-person POV, Max’s.  There are plugs in the back for the next three books, all of which piqued my interest.  And as always, there’s the “Dramatis Thingummy” (“Cast of Characters”) in the front which is extremely helpful, although not quite comprehensive.  But I'm not complaining, the omissions are mostly minor characters.

 

    Most time-travel novelists avoid those pesky time-travel paradoxes (what happens if I go back in time and shoot my grandfather?), but here Jodi Taylor embraces them.  Three or four major players get caught up in these paradoxes.  So far, no discernible aftereffects are noted, but I have a feeling that will change in the upcoming books.

 

    I enjoyed the music references, although I had to look up the song “Things Can Only Get Better”, which I learned was a Howard Jones hit.   The mention of Eratosthenes thrilled me; IMHO he was the most brilliant person ever to walk this earth.  I also liked the attention paid of how they hauled those huge slabs of rocks to Stonehenge.  We know they were transported across a long distance, but to this day we don’t know how it was done.  Other sidelights were a nice literary nod to Terry Pratchett, a chilling curse from Kassandra’s, and being introduced to the feisty character Professor Eddington "Eddie" Penrose.  I have a feeling he’ll become a recurring character.

 

    The ending is fantastic, being twisty, unexpected, and satisfying all at once.  It opens up a whole new otherworld of possibilities, and closes out with a teaser for the sequel, which some have called a cliffhanger, but I respectfully disagree.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Welly Whanging Contest (n., phrase) : a sport in which competitors are required to throw a Wellington boot as far as possible.

Others: Stonker (n., British); Pillocks (n., British, plural), Knees-Up (n., British); P45 (n., British), Bimbling (v., British); Oik (n., Derogatory), Gurning (n., British).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 1,833 ratings and 686 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.28*/5, based on 12,586 ratings and 1,004 reviews.

 

Excerpts...

    I could have been a bomb-disposal expert, or a volunteer for the Mars mission, or a firefighter, something safe and sensible.  But, no, I had to be an historian.  I had to join the St. Mary’s Institute of Historical Research.  Over the years I’d been chased by a T-rex, had the Great Library fall on me, grappled with Jack the Ripper, and been blown up by an exploding manure heap.  All about par for the course.  (pg. 2)

 

    “I think I may have cholera.  You really need to check me over.  Fast.”

    “Do you actually have any symptoms at all?  Of anything?  Anything medical?”

    “Yes.  Yes, I do.  I’ve got that thing that makes you feel funny.  You know.  All over.  Requires immediate and urgent attention.”

    “What are you talking about?”

    “You know.  Four letter word.  Begins with L.  Ends with E.”

    “Ah, lice!  Come with me.”  (pg. 114)

 

When you’ve really screwed something up, the secret is to jump in with both feet and make it worse.  (pg. 296)

    I gave A Second Chance a rare 10*/10 rating, so I don’t really have any quibbles.  There is a small amount of cussing, (8 instances in the first 76 pages, 20% of the book), a roll-in-the-hay or two, and allusions to rape and mutilation.  But those sort of things are to be expected when you tplop down in a war zone where a 10-year siege is underway.

 

    Most of the negative reviews seem to be about the Romance aspect of the story, primarily Max and Leon’s relationship.  The reviewers either think he’s a jerk, she’s a jerk, or they’re both jerks.  But since I’m not reading these books for the Love angles, our protagonists' relationship issues don’t bother me.  And for other guys who are reading this, rest assured that the romance plays second fiddle to the time-travel and historical fiction aspects.

 

    A Second Chance is the third book I've read in this series; the first two books in the series are reviewed here (***) and here (***), and I feel like Jodi Taylor is really hitting her stride with this one.  Books 4 through 10 are sitting on my TBR shelf and I can’t wait to see if they continue the streak of excellent reads in this series.

 

    10 Stars.    It’s always fun to learn a new and useful phrase in a foreign language.  Here it’s the wee bit of Latin wisdom: “Policiti Nostrae Omnec Wankers Sunt” (“Most Politicians are not very good”).  Heh.

Boy's Life - Robert McCammon

   1991 (although it was first copyrighted back in 1983); 611 pages.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Horror; Fantasy; Coming-of-Age.  Laurels: World Fantasy Award – Best Novel (winner, 1992); Bram Stoker Award – Best Novel (winner, 1991).  Overall Rating : 10*/10.

 

    Robert R. McCammon’s Boy’s Life.  Wikipedia notes: “It is considered by readers and critics as his best novel”, and I gotta say there’s sufficient evidence to support that claim.

 

    It won the Bram Stoker Award, which is given by the Horror Writers Association, for Best Novel in 1991.  And yes, there are beasts and ghosts and things that go bump in the night, and some that even go bump in the daytime, in Boy’s Life.  But this is not primarily a horror story.

 

    It won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1992.  And yes, there are some magic moments, some timely spellcasting, and some aerial acrobatics reminiscent of the movie ET.  But this is not primarily a fantasy tale.

 

    Rather, I’d call Boy’s Life a coming-of-age novel.  The main character, Cory Mackenson, is a 12-year-old boy when the book opens, and grows to be a 13-year-old adult by the book's end.  Alas, 600-page coming-of-age books often get tedious along the way.

 

    Which is why the Horror and Fantasy elements make this such a fantastic book.

 

What’s To Like...

    Boy’s Life is set in the fictional small town of Zephyr, Alabama in 1964 and chronicles the strange goings-on there through the first-person POV of our protagonist, 12-year-old Cory, who’s actually writing all this in (his) present-day 1991.  Robert McCammon divides the story into four “seasonal” parts, plus an epilogue:

    a.) The Shades of Spring  (0%-22%)

    b.) A Summer of Devils and Angels  (22%-46%)

    c.) Burning Autumn  (46%-74%)

    d.) Winter’s Cold Truth  (74%-97%)

    e.) Zephyr as It is  (97%-99%)

 

    The primary storyline concerns Cory and his dad witnessing a car plunging into nearby Saxon Lake with a dead man at the wheel.  Cory’s father, Tom, becomes haunted by the brutal image of the corpse, and we tag along with Cory as he tries to solve the macabre mystery murder, all the while experiencing the life of a "tween-ager" hanging out with his friends and enjoying the “magic” that kids can see in life even when adults cannot.

 

    I loved the “feel” of life in America during the early 1960’s.  Cory was born in 1952; I was born two years earlier.  Zephyr is a little bitty place out in the boondocks of Alabama; I spent the first ten years of my life in a zero-traffic-light podunk town in Pennsylvania that had a total population of just over 200.  So, Boy’s Life resonated strongly with me.

 

    It was fun to go sleuthing alongside Cory: we both got fooled by a red herring or two; and when clues did unfold, they were often more mystifying than enlightening and occasionally spawned secondary plotlines.  But it was just as much of a blast to relive the life of a 12-year-old again by activities such as:

    playing sandlot baseball with friends,

    dealing with eccentric family members and boring social occasions,

    meeting a beautiful girl who doesn't flick boogers at you,

    collecting Civil War bubble-gum cards (I had some of those!),

    going to the movie theater to watch The Three Stooges.

 

    The storytelling is superb, and I was in awe of Robert McCammon’s ability to seamlessly blend Fantasy, Horror, Mystery-Solving, and Coming-of-Age genres.  I liked the “worry pebbles”, agreed with Cory’s opinion about wasps, and was saddened by how the evolution of the milk-delivery system impacted his dad.  I enjoyed meeting both “The Lady” and “Lucifer” (who's a monkey, not a demon).  The story of “Carl and Rebel” left a lump in my throat and I could relate to Cory's bicycle dying.

 

    There were also some serious topics touched upon in Boy’s Life.  The preacher’s raving about a demonic Beach Boys’ song (Go ahead, guess which one.  We’ll list it in the comments.) may seem silly at first, but I’ve seen frenzied fundamentalists burning records, and listened to dire warnings of how backward-masking rock-&-roll songs can turn you into a devil-worshipper.  And though the author is born and raised in Alabama, this book makes it clear what he thinks of segregation, the KKK, and burning crosses.

 

    The ending is filled with tension and suitably exciting, even though you know Cory will survive because, well, he’s writing this book.  All the plot threads are tied up, and even the escaped freak-show beast gets its fitting reward.  I guessed the “whydunit” correctly, although I was off as on the “whodunit” angle.  I found that trying to solve the various mysteries before Cory does is an exercise in futility; but keeping your eyes peeled for clues popping up is much more productive.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 1,779 ratings.

    Goodreads: 4.36/5 based on 26,619 ratings and 2,964 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    We all start out knowing magic.  We are born with whirlwinds, forest fires, and comets inside us.  We are born able to sing to birds and read the clouds and see our destiny in grains of sand.  But then we get the magic educated right out of our souls.  We get it churched out, spanked out, washed out, and combed out.  We get put on the straight and narrow and told to be responsible.  Told to act our age.  Told to grow up, for God’s sake.  (loc. 59)

 

    I left Rocket to wait there, and I walked up the hill among the moon-splashed tombstones.  (…)  The white dead people lay on one side, the black dead people on the other.  It made sense that people who could not eat in the same café, swim in the same public pool, or shop in the same stores would not be happy being dead and buried within sight of each other.  Which made me want to ask Reverend Lovoy sometime if the Lady and the Moon Man would be going to the same heaven as Davy Ray.  If black people occupied the same heaven as white people, what was the point of eating in different cafes here on earth?  (loc. 7538)

 

Kindle Details…

    At the moment, you can pick up Boy’s Life for $11.99 at Amazon, although the author periodically offers it at a generous discount.  Robert McCammon has several other e-novels available at Amazon, ranging in price from $5.99 to $15.99, plus a couple of short stories for under $2 each.

 

The need to hear stories, or live lives other than our own for even the briefest moment, is the key to the magic that was born in our bones.  (loc. 533)

    It’s difficult to find anything to nitpick about in Boy’s Life.  There’s a fair amount of cussing throughout the book, but that's to be expected for this kind of tale.  There’s a slew of characters to meet and greet.  Some of them are important, others strut briefly across the stage and then are gone, never to return.  It might’ve been nice to have a “Cast of Characters” section at the front for reference, but I keep my own notes anyway, so this didn’t hinder me.  And finally, since Robert McCammon is a recognized top-tier Horror genre author, if you’re wanting the book to scare you poopless or gross you out, you might be disappointed.

 

    But I pick at nits.  For me, Boy’s Life was a fantastic novel, covering multiple genres, without any slow spots (it was an event-filled year for Cory), and with a perfect blend of excitement, drama, eeriness, and mystery-solving.  I’ve yet to any of Robert McCammon’s "genuine" Horror tales, but a couple of them are on my bookshelf, so I have no excuse not to read one of them in the near future.

 

    10 Stars.   A friend recommended Boy’s Life to me, citing it as being Robert McCammon at his best.  I took that as a challenge since I’ve read the first couple books of his Matthew Corbett series and given them all 9*/10 ratings.  It turns out my friend was right.

The Last Oracle - James Rollins

    2008; 577 pages.  Book 5 (out of 14) in the “Sigma Force” series.  New Author? : No.  Genre : Suspense; Thriller; Action-Adventure; Save-the-World.  Overall Rating : 10 */10.

    Someone just tried to kill Gray Pierce, the commander of the black ops unit “Sigma Force”.  In broad daylight.  In the middle of Washington D.C.  Right outside the Sigma Force headquarters, no less.

    It was only by an extraordinary stroke of luck that Gray survived.  Some homeless guy had just wandered up to him, looking for a handout, no doubt.  The sniper’s bullet wiped him out instead of Gray.  I suppose it’s theoretically possible the vagrant was the intended target, but why would a professional hitman have any reason to take out a homeless person?

    Nah, that's not very likely.  Somehow Gray’s cover has been blown and that needs to be fixed, and fast.  Just as soon as he attends to one small detail.

    Why was the panhandler carrying around a 2,000-year-old coin?

What’s To Like...

    The action starts immediately as The Last Oracle opens with a prologue set in 398 A.D. Greece during the final days of the famed Oracle at Delphi.  It never lets up after that as various members of Sigma Force combat the bad guys on a variety of fronts: Washington D.C., India, the Ural Mountains in Russia, and Pripyat, Ukraine, the latter being the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster better known as “Chernobyl”.

    As with any Sigma Force novel, there are multiple plotlines to follow.  Here, at least at the beginning, they are:  1.) Who shot the panhandler?  2.) Why was the panhandler trying to reach Gray?  3.) What’s with the skull?  4.) What’s so special about Sasha?  5.) Where’s Monk?  6.) What are the nefarious plans (dubbed “Operation Saturn” and “Operation Uranus”) that Savina and Nicolas have concocted?

    There's lots of intrigue, plenty of shooting, chases galore, and enough wit to keep things from getting too somber.  Monk, a Sigma Force member and apparently MIA at the end of the previous novel (I’m not reading this series in order), is initially way out in the boonies, and it was fun to watch how James Rollins works him back towards reuniting with his wife and old SF buddies.  I liked also that not all the Russian characters are “pure black”, nor are all of the Americans “pure white”.  Other writers of Thrillers should take heed of this.

    The book is well-researched.  I learned about Russia’s struggles with maintaining the safety of its nuclear power program.  I’d never heard of the Russian city of Chelyabinsk (just pronounce it “jellybeans”), despite it being Russia’s 9^th-largest city, and the sad fate of the nearby Lake Karachay.  There was an autism angle as well, including something called  “Autistic Savant Syndrome” which figured prominently in the tale.

    You’ll learn one or two Russian cuss phrases, plus a few snippets of the Romani (Gypsy) tongue.  There's only a few cases of cussing in English, and there are some neat drawings that are critical to the storyline.  James Rollins keeps meticulous track of the timing of each scene (down to the exact minute) , which really helped since the action is worldwide and the plot threads are often occurring simultaneously.  The 22 chapters, plus a Prologue and an Epilogue, average out to about 24 pages each, but those chapters have lots of scene shifts, so you’re never far from a good place to stop for the night.

Excerpts...

    Elizabeth fled with Kowalski down a crooked alley.  A sewage trench lined one side, reeking and foul.

    “Do you have another gun?” she asked.

    “You shoot?”

    “Skeet.  In college.”

    “Not much difference.  Targets just scream a bit more.”  (pg. 299)

    “She might survive, but in what state?  The augment, besides heightening her savant talent, also minimizes the symptoms of her autism.  Take the augment away, and you’ll be left with a child disconnected from the world.”

    “That’s better than being in the grave,” Kat said.

    “Is it?” McBride challenged her.  “Who are you to judge?  With the augment, she has a full life, as short as that might be.  Many children are born doomed from the start, given life sentences by medical conditions.  Leukemia, AIDS, birth defects.  Shouldn’t we seek to give them the best quality of life, rather than quantity?”

    Kat scowled.  “You only want to use her.”

    “Since when is mutual benefit such a bad thing?”  (pg. 376)

“Kowalski, help her.”  “But she shot me!”  (pg. 449)

        The ending is fantastic, climactic, twisty, and bittersweet.  The good guys may prevail, but it comes at a cost.  Chapter 22 is a general epilogue for the survivors of the adventure, and it’s followed by a shorter, more-focused “Epilogue” section that’ll leave a lump in your throat.  You don't see that often in an Action-Adventure story.

    Be sure to read the “Author’s Note To Readers: Truth or Fiction” (pgs. 573-577) at the end to learn what parts of the story are true and what parts were dreamed up by James Rollins.   You will be astounded.

    There’s not really anything to quibble about in The Last Oracle.  My expectations for any James Rollins book are high, and this one fully met them.

    10 Stars.  You can double-check some of the startling claims in the Truth-or-Fiction section  by going out to Wikipedia and reading about Chelyabinsk, Lake Karachay, and Chernobyl.  Wiki’s section about the latter was particularly eye-opening for me.  Yes, Chernobyl is today a ghost town  due to the radiation levels.  But a few people still live there, and, besides two general stores for those diehards, there's even (get this!) a hotel catering to tourists.