Review: Colin Fischer

By Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz
Available now from Razorbill (Penguin)
Review copy

Colin Fischer is just looking to get through high school.  But one day someone brings a gun to school, and bully Wayne Connelly is blamed.  Colin knows Wayne didn't do it, but that means he has to find the real culprit to prove Wayne's innocence.  Colin may have trouble putting together a facial expression with what people are thinking and feeling, but he has other powers of perception.

I loved the format of COLIN FISCHER.  There are excerpts from Colin's journal and lots of footnotes in addition to the third-person narration.  Emotions are always mentioned in skinny capital letters.  These bits of flair give insight into the way Colin thinks.  He has Asperger's Syndrome, giving him a different point of view on what happened in the cafeteria than the rest of his classmates who are perfectly content to believe the disliked and low class Wayne Connelly did it.

There's a nice balance between Colin's school and home life and the mystery.  COLIN FISCHER sets up a series, so there have to be some elements that will carry through future entries.  There's a love interest, a new friendship, and Colin's fledgling basketball skills.  He's also got a complicated relationship with his younger brother, who resents the fact that Colin isn't "normal."  As for the mystery, I liked that Colin doesn't quite understand the danger he puts himself in.  He just wants to solve the puzzle, but there are people who don't want the puzzle solved.  It made a bit more sense than some protagonists who through themselves knowingly into danger.

I think COLIN FISCHER could be the start of a very fun mystery series.  There's always room for more idiosyncratic, determined detectives, at least in my opinion.  I also enjoyed the factoids sprinkled throughout the text, courtesy of Colin, because I love trivia.  I like that Ashley Edward Miller and Zack Stentz did their research and make an effort to portray Colin's social issues accurately.  Overall, I liked COLIN FISCHER quite a bit and I'll be back for the sequel.

Review: Enchanted by Starlight

By Tina L. Hook
Self-published
Review copy

I don't normally review self-published books, but I asked to review ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT by a PR company through which I've reviewed several fun chick lit novels.  So I decided to give Tina L. Hook's debut a chance.  Thankfully, ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT doesn't suffer from bad copy editing, also known as my number-one gripe with self-publishing.

ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT follows the lives of three women who gained a superpower through each of their encounters with a comet.  Grace, my favorite, can make men fall in love with her.  But she quickly realizes that she prefers relationships that don't involve her power.  Skylar can make people like her.  Skylar could've been a really cool character, but she had less to do than the other two.  Most of her growth happens in the chapter where she decides to stop being a kept woman and get a job she likes.  Aside from that, she's mostly there because the other two women know her and she's part of their stories.  Alina's power is that she can influence people based on their thoughts.  And Alina is a real piece of work, driven by jealousy and hate.  She doesn't deserve the abusive relationship she ends up in during ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT, certainly, but she's not a nice person.  Her chapters made my skin crawl.

ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT opens with the three women meeting in one place for the first time, on a night when another comet will pass by.  Aside from their powers, they're united through one man, Liam.  ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT then goes back to their teen years to show how they ended up at that point.  It's a good basic structure, but sometimes the chapters jump back or forth in time with little reason for being suddenly nonlinear.  As for Liam, as we get to know him, it diffuses some of the tension of the upcoming fight between the women because he's a total jerk and loser.

Really, the main parts of ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT that I liked were Grace's growth as a character and her friendship with Skylar.  Too much of the book was about women scheming to tear each other down, often because of a man.  It's certainly something that happens, but it isn't a plot that I find compelling.

The ebook of ENCHANTED BY STARLIGHT is only 99 cents, which is very reasonable.  For that price, it's a reasonably entertaining story with no annoying formatting errors.  But I wouldn't recommend paying for the paperback.

Review: Elemental

By Antony John
Available now from Dial (Penguin)
Review copy

Thomas lives on an island of fifteen people.  Everyone has a power, known as an element, aside from Thomas.  Then the Guardians are kidnapped during a sudden storm, leaving Thomas and the other kids to escape the pirates on their own.  As they struggle to keep themselves safe, they begin to discover all the secrets the adults kept.

It took me awhile to figure out ELEMENTAL was set in the future, despite that being mentioned in the very first line printed on the back of my ARC.  Clearly I didn't read what the book was about before diving in.  I enjoyed trying to piece together what happened to the world, curious about the plague that left behind only a few people who had magical powers.

Some of ELEMENTAL was pretty predictable.  Obviously Thomas actually does have a special ability.  (I'll admit to not entirely understanding how his ability worked, but that might be because Thomas didn't entirely get it himself.)  I found the love triangle tolerable, mostly because both Alice and Rose are sixteen too, and their only other romantic option is Thomas's older brother who is also a bit of an outcast because he predicts people's deaths.  There just aren't enough available guys to prevent the love triangle.  It's also pretty low key.  The kids' focus is on getting their families back and getting away from the pirates, not making out.  Rose and Alice's competition just provides a bit of tension within the group.

I thought ELEMENTAL was a standalone fantasy, so I was a bit disappointed by the obvious lead in to a sequel at the end.  ELEMENTAL does contain a complete adventure, but many of the big questions remain unanswered at the end of the book.  That's fine if there are going to be more books, but it wasn't what I expected when I started.

I found ELEMENTAL mildly diverting, but I was never absorbed into the world Antony John has created.  It was fun enough, but I'm not driven to read the possible sequel to get answers and see what Thomas and the others do now that they know more about their world.  I think the novel just felt kind of shallow.  There was no spark that made me love these characters or this world.

Review: Will Sparrow's Road

By Karen Cushman
Available now from Clarion Books (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Review copy

Newberry Award medalist Karen Cushman's newest novel is also her first featuring a male protagonist.  Will Sparrow's father sold him to an innkeeper for ale, but now Will is striking out on his own, determined to lie, steal, and cheat his way to a better life.  Unfortunately for Will, he isn't half as hard as he thinks he is.

I think even less experienced readers (aka the kiddos this book is aimed at) will realize that Will isn't the most perceptive spyglass on the binocular shelf.  (I really wanted to go for a metaphor there, but it just isn't working.  Please suggestion what I should have said in the comments.)  He's often cheated by others, and when he falls in with a couple of oddities and their leader, their actions show their true character long before Will catches on.  Plus, most modern readers won't assume, as Will does, that dwarfism is some punishment for sin.

But while Will manages to get into trouble due to his inability to read people and situations, he also gets into trouble because he's not cut out to be a thief.  He can justify some of the things he steals, but overall he doesn't have the desperation or the cruelty to survive on stolen goods.  He's young and still has time to learn which people he can trust, befriend, and model himself upon.

I love how fully Cushman can bring Elizabethan England to life in so few pages.  Her characters are not modern people dropped into the past.  Their mindset is very different than our own, though they hope for so many of the same things.  (Freedom, shelter, friends, comfort - the basics.)  Perhaps the most modern is Grace Wyse, but she's developed as an outcast from society due to her appearance.

Reading WILL SPARROW'S ROAD took me back to read CATHERINE, CALLED BIRDY and THE MIDWIFE'S APPRENTICE back in elementary school.  Cushman knows her niche, even when she changes it up a little.  Her historical novels are very human and give interesting insight into history.

Movie Monday: Zatoichi

I am completely out of it due to 24/7 babysitting, so I'll stick to pointing out that the Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman series is free to watch on Hulu.