Book Reviews: The Hunger Games Trilogy

So, over the last week or so I’ve been tearing through The Hunger Games Trilogy. I downloaded all of them onto my Kindle mostly because I had reached a plateau of indifference with The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series and needed a palate cleanser but also because I genuinely wanted to finally find out what all the fuss was about before the movie got released. And I have to say I’m really glad I did.  I’ve decided to review the trilogy as a whole instead of reviewing the books individually, because I’m not sure what I can say about them individually that everyone and their dog hasn’t already said. I also want to do a blog post or multiple posts comparing the movie cast with who I have in my head, which I’ll get to later.

But for now lets deal with the books shall we? I wanted to talk about each book on their own merits, but I think I’d like to talk about the entire story arc instead. The problem I had with the story as a whole that I did not have with the individual books themselves is that I think the series wanted to be two things, it wanted to be about love triangle between three people put in a very difficult situation, which is why it kept putting Katniss in between Gale and Peeta. But it also wanted to be a story about governmental power and how media and entertainment can be perverted and manipulated to control the masses but how it can also be used as a tool of rebellion. Both stories are fine and can be told together, as was shown masterfully by the first two books, but if you can’t figure out how to end both uniformly, which I feel was the case in the third book, just do one.

See, the thing is, I’m still really hung up on the third book for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. I fell asleep the night after I finished the book, perturbed with how the book  and the series as a whole finished and I woke up the next day just as perturbed for reasons I don’t understand. What I’m coming to figure out is that for the first three-quarters of the book, I was excited because I couldn’t quite tell where the author was going with the story. And then I realized neither did she. Susanne Collins, I truly believe, did not know how to end the story and so she wrote about a million different endings that kept piling onto each other in ways that didn’t make sense.

O.k., I’m about to get really spoilery for quite awhile.  If you haven’t read the third book, stop reading. First of all, the book pissed me off when Prim got killed off because it got rushed to that part. How Prim ended up in the middle of the battle field felt so forced and strange and absurd to everything else that had happened. Having Katniss injured (AGAIN! Seriously, this is some kind of torture porn on par with the abuse The Bride has to take in the Kill Bill series, its almost ridiculous!) and in this weird comatose state didn’t help matters either because it felt inauthentic to the Katniss we’d known throughout the entire series. And then! Pinning the whole bombing back on the leader of the rebel alliance, President Coin, felt even more forced and absurd. The big kicker was assembling the survivors of the games and having them decide if another games should be held, this time with Capitol survivors was so completely craze balls random that I can’t even figure out why it would be there. I mean I get it, but I still don’t get it. And to solve the whole romantic triangle between Katniss, Gale and Peeta by having Katniss and Peeta just sorta… end up together. It felt off. You build these characters up, and explain their reliance and love for each other and then you just let it peter out like that? Really? Like I said, the first three-quarters gave me the feeling that it could’ve ended any number of ways, so for it to end up the way it did just felt like a lot of wasted energy.

I still love the series as a whole, but I feel there could have been some forethought placed on the ending that would’ve put for heft on everything that preceded it. An argument could be made for the ending that is there being more realistic. It’s not as if I thought the Mockingjay would rise to power and start running the government. That really wasn't Katniss's bag from the very beginning. I very much thought she’d end back up in the forest she loved, but not the way she did. Okay, rant done.

So, to be thorough, I give Hunger Games, the first book an A, Catching Fire an A+ and The Mockingjay a solid B. The series a whole, I give a B+ and I’m really super excited for the upcoming movie. Keep it tuned here for my casting analysis for all three books.

Bloody Munchkin beaten by the Book Contest

You know that one martial arts character in like every action movie ever that enters some tournament all full of bravado and piss and vinegar only to be knocked out in the first round? That’s what I feel like right now. Actually, you know that movie Balls of Fury where the guy goes into his first tournament in years thinking it’ll be a piece of cake only to be thoroughly tromped by…. Patton Oswalt? Yeah, that’s where I’m at right now.

Well That Happened. I had high hopes, really I did, but maybe it was a crap shoot the way my husband said, or maybe I didn’t do enough to distinguish myself, or maybe the field was really stacked against me, but whatever the reason, my book didn’t get past the first round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Contest.

I should probably be more upset, or God knows what my reaction should be. But I’m dealing with it better than I expected. And yes, before you even ask, I consider eating the last Thin Mints in a flurry dealing with things better than expected, because A) It wasn’t a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and  b) I’m not crying my eyes out, which based on my penchant for drama is usually my normal reaction to this sort of  rejection.

I could tell I wasn’t the only one dealing with my rejection though. My husband took me to lunch and we tried to make sense of the rejection together. I think, even though he knew it was a crapshoot, he wanted this for me as badly as I did.  

I tried. I put myself and my book out there and I tried. And I’m going to keep trying. The thing is, I know my book is worthy of being published and that it should be. I’m incredibly proud of what I did and I will find a way to get it out there, period. I wrote the book as a way to cope and to deal with all of the hardships and heartache we were dealing with regarding Ukiah and in a way the book and the characters that I created have become my babies as well. And I know my baby got rejected yesterday, but I’ll just pick my chin back up and try again.

And honestly, based on the titles that were picked to go to the next round, maybe I’m happy I didn’t. I kevetched with my husband on some of the titles that did make it through. I mean “Time Sniffers” made it through and my title didn’t? Time Sniffers? This is an actual title of an actual book that someone actually wrote? I don’t know where to begin.And that title wasn't even the worst offender. Don't get me started.

I don’t know where to go next, because I’m really flying blind here. I don’t know whether to start looking for literary agents again, or to enter another contest , or take a class on getting published, but rest assured, this is not the end to the story, it is just the beginning.

Book Review: The Necromancer

I finally slogged through The Necromancer, the fourth book of The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, which was a bigger deal than I thought it would be, considering I had read it halfway through before I realized there were three books before it. But on the bright side, there is so much that makes sense now!

There is sooooo much going on in this book that it’s hard to know where to begin. There are all sorts of different locales, there are just as many new characters, not to mention shadow realms that it is really hard to keep up. The story starts where it began, back in San Francisco, and it is where several story lines converge and then break off again, which adds to the intensity. What’s funny about this story is that it feels, and makes the other three books feel by comparison, as if it’s a set piece only there to set up bigger action.

But it’s still good and interestingly layered. Characters that were only hinted at finally reveal themselves, and yet they are still shrouded in mystery. There was a hooked man that was mentioned in a few of the earlier books and he finally gets introduced in this book. Some of the elders and dark elders that have only been hinted at have started revealing themselves and you start to realize the machinations at play.

The other interesting thing is that the twins aren’t even boring anymore. That’s mostly because they’ve both become ciphers for other people’s stories. The more that Sophie delves into The Witch of Endor’s memories, the more layered and interesting she is as a character. The more Josh is used as a pawn for Mars Ultor and Dee, the more interesting he becomes.

It’s still a good book with its own plot and its own action, but I still can’t shake the feeling that it feels less like its own fully formed story and more like a jumping platform for the rest of the action that is about to take place. B

Bloody Munchkin and the Book Contest Fight!

So the first round for the ABNA contest  that I entered officially ended yesterday. I guess I probably would’ve made more of a fuss about it if I hadn’t been so busy. I only edited my entry twice, which, based on the number of times I’ve edited the book I put up for the contest is showing considerable restraint. And really and truly I probably would’ve spent a considerable amount of time editing and re-editing the entire entry if I wasn’t so darned busy. The last weekend in January found me hanging out in New Orleans for a work function, so I had absolutely no time in which to be obsessively neurotic there and then I come home and life continued to intervene.

Work and life as a mother of a four month old continually intervened, which is probably a blessing in disguise. In truth, because this is my first book, not to mention first creative writing project I’ve ever completed, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. Should I have not submitted the first two chapters as my 5000 word sample? Should I have submitted chapter three, where I actually introduce the main character, instead? But the contest rules clearly stated up to the first 5000 words, and I should follow the letter of the law right? But maybe the letter of the law could be taken to mean 5000 introductory words? And what about my author’s introduction section, and should I have created a preview? And… and?!?!

See that? That inner monologue that you just had to endure? I’m really happy I was too busy to continue to have that conversation with myself while the contest was still open. Because if I had continued, and if I had made the inner monologue an outer diatribe and forced my husband to listen to it over and over again, you would’ve heard reports of a grisly murder suicide in a quiet tri-valley area suburb.

So now all I can do is wait until the second round to see if I’m one of the 1000 entrants that was selected to go to the next round, which wraps on February 23^rd. I’d probably be neurotically anxious about it if life would stop getting in the way. But thankfully it won’t.

Adventures in Eating

I haven’t posted much about my daughter Boo Bear since her birth for a number of reasons, chief amongst them being that I’m afraid she’ll come to me when she’s fifteen with printed out copies of this blog ranting and raving that my writing about her ‘is RUINING my social life’ this and ‘Why are you so embarrassing?’ that and ‘This is the reason I should be legally emancipated’ blah blah blah we’re both seeking counseling blah.

But she’s so cute and adorbs and awesome at this stage that it’s hard not to blab about her. As exhibit A I give you last night. Well maybe last night is a bad example, because it did have my stomach churning there by the end but that wasn’t really her fault exactly. I blame Gerber’s pureed peas* because they DO NOT look very appealing coming back out as they do going in.

[*edited because pureed pees is much worse than pureed peas and no wonder my stomach was turning!]

So yes, she’s just over four months now and is eating pureed food and it is…. It defies words, this experience does. She talks when she eats and gets crabby and a little bit yelly when she doesn’t to hilarious effect. Probably the written word won’t do it justice but I’ma try anyway.

So I start to feed her and the process makes her so happy that she oohs and aahs while I’m feeding her. I’ll put a spoon to her mouth with food on it and she gives me this deep guttural ‘uuuuuhhhhh’ letting me know just how happy and content the experience is making her. And then, during the 3.2 seconds that I take the spoon away to get another spoonful of food and then bring it back to her mouth, she “Ah, Ah, Ah"'s her displeasure at not have another spoonful of food IMMEDIATELY until I am able to get that spoonful of food back into her mouth and then its ‘uhh, uhh, uhh” again and the cycle repeats itself over and over again until we have finished and I wipe off her face and she then voices her displeasure at having her face cleaned and then we’re done.

Last night was a little different. I was reintroducing peas to her. She started out with peas but hadn’t had them in some time, so I thought it would be good to re-establish them into her diet. I can’t decide if that was a mistake or one of the greatest decisions of my life, because it was hilarious but also kind of gross. Somehow our cues were off last night and I kept getting that spoonful to her mouth right while she was mid ‘uhh, uhh’ and she would spurt the spoonful everywhere. I know kids at this age usually wear more food than they eat but the splatter zone on this was impressive. The whole time all I kept thinking of was how much of a resemblance she bared to Randy from ‘A Christmas Story’ and I couldn’t stop chuckling to myself. Also, her high chair and tray started looking like a lost Jackson Pollack painting by the end. Had this been pureed sweet potatoes, I would’ve found it just hilarious but for some reason, it being pureed peas, I found the whole endeavor both funny and queasy making. But do you know who I ended up feeling sorry for during this whole exercise? The bib! For some reason the bib and the collateral damage it took reminded me of the bib in that one scene in Monty Python and the Meaning of Life with the Fat Guy who binged and purged until the Thin Mint did him in, and the abuse that poor bib took during that scene. And then I started feeling sorry for both the bib in that scene and the bib my daughter was wearing and now I’m feeling sad that the bib in such an insignificant piece of clothing that has to take on so much collateral damage from infants and toddlers everywhere!  

Music Review: Hourglass EP

I love it when new music just falls into my lap, or more to the point, comes up, slaps me across the face and forces me to pay attention to it when I’m least expecting it. It doesn’t happen very often but when it does its memorable. I can remember discovering Better Than Ezra eons ago on a defunct TV show (that subsequently launched Orlando Jones’ career, which weird, also neither here nor there so moving on) on FX when FX was a completely different cable channel called Sound FX. They were a revelation and are still one of the only bands to make it out of my teens relatively unscathed.

Other musical revelations that caught me completely off guard include a moment when an old coworker and music junkie handing me a mix CD involving a Rocky Votolato song that rocked me to the core, finding The Joy Formidable thanks to a person I follow on twitter and now I can count finding Brian Bergeron amongst those experiences. He followed me on twitter for whatever reason God only knows. He wasn’t the typical account that follows me on twitter (usually they are fake accounts featuring scantily clad women asking me to check out their porn sites, don’t ask me why cause I haven’t the foggiest). His twitter account intrigued me, I clicked a link to his website, listened to the music from his EP, Hourglass and fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

It’s a solid folk EP, and it meets are the mile markers a good folk album is supposed to. The stand out to me is 'Don’t Let Me Go'. I keep coming back to it, and it keeps giving me goose bumps the way a good song is meant to.  The other two I like. The title song, Hourglass is also grabbing me the more I listen to it. Although I have to say ‘One I Want’ is great lyrically, but a little shaky musically maybe?  But that's the only criticism I can even think to throw at it. But the EP is well worth it. I love finding indie music in my neck of the woods (San Francisco, I love you and your awesome music scene!) and Bergeron is no exception.  and I’ll probably end up downloading the EP post haste just so I can listen to Don’t Let Me Go over and over again, and also to support awesome burgeoning talent. ("Yeah, that Brian Bergeron? I was in on the ground floor on that. He's awesome!" or so goes the imaginary conversation at some awesome cocktail party I'm always going to in my head).

Brian Bergeron, if you’re reading, thanks for this chance encounter to listen to some quality music and thanks for the goose bumps.

Bloody Munchkin Vs. The Book Contest

So you remember that book I talked about forever and a day ago? That one where I half-heartedly sent it into a literary agent? Yeah that one?

Well it was rejected by said literary agent in 0.37 seconds forever and a day ago. And said rejection, forever and a day ago, lead to one of my favorite conversations ever:

“Yeah, they sent me back a postcard sized rejection letter.”

“Dude, I realize that postage is expensive and stuff but would it kill them to send a full size letter when they  reject you?”

“I had to send a self-addressed stamped envelope with my query. They rejected me with my own postage.”

“Dude!”

I think if I were ever to open up a Café Press store or to create my own t-shirt, ‘They rejected me with my own postage’ would be the t-shirt I’d make. Well that, and I have to make both my dad and my daughter shirts that say ‘I could eat.’ Because they can, often and in quantity.

But I didn’t come here to talk about random conversations I’ve had, or what witty t-shirts I’d make if I’d have the chance. Today I took a potentially big step and submitted my book into the 2012 Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. And I have to be honest, I’m freaking out. I have been for about a week straight. I’ve thought and over-thought about a million little things and then, while entering the contest, I realized that there were a million other things that I hadn’t thought about at all, which means I’m going to spend another week thinking and over-thinking those things until the contest officially closes and I’m not allowed to think of those things any more.

Did I mention I’m freaking out? To the point of distraction and also to the point that its not just me that I’m distracting. I’m calling my phone tree for help every few seconds, bouncing ideas off of them, peppering them with the smallest insignificant questions, dumping tons of emails on them so that they can review my stuff for grammar and content. But the person getting the brunt of it is my husband, my poor amazing husband who has always sort of realized that I’m a total co-dependent but the reality hit him hard this week. I was second guessing every decision I’d ever made, up to the point that I was considering rewriting the first two chapters, or cutting them out altogether. I think he had to talk me down off the metaphorical ledge about this sort of stuff like five times. And the number of times he had to tear me away from vigorous revising this weekend was astronomical. “Would you put that away for an hour, you have a child to feed.”

Or:

“If I don’t get this published soon, I’m going to be revising it until I’m eighty!”

“I knew that. And?”

(Ok, so maybe I did come here to talk about random conversations)

Finally, I let out my worries. “What if one sentence, or one decision is the difference between making it through a round and not making it through?”

“I don’t think one sentence or one paragraph is going to make a huge difference. There’s a million different reasons why you might not make it through. The person reading your entry could be pissed off at life, or in a really bad mood or could just not be into it that day when every other day this would have been something he or she was into. Try not to over-think it.”

Which, has my husband met me? That’s all I do, ever! But he’s right, there could be a thousand reasons why I won’t make it to the next round or the round after that and they may have nothing to do with my actual book, or they may have everything to do with my book. But at some point I just have to trust that I created a great story and hope that other people see that too.

I hope so. I hope that everything Ukiah taught me and that I put in that book gets out there into the world. I hope I can share my memories of him with other people and that they’d get to know what a tremendous spirit he was, because it is in there too. I hope.

Book Review: The Sorceress

I finally slogged through the Third book of The Secrets ofthe Immortal Nicholas Flamel (and again can I just say how non-handy that series title is? It’s huge and it’s clunky and it’s like trying to un-stick carmel and peanut butter from the roof of your mouth, just saying it out loud. Dear Michael Scott: Great book series, lousy series title. Signed, The World).

Before I get started with the book review can I just say that sometimes the act of reading itself can just be a chore? (Which may or may not explain my big drought of not reading, but hey, whatever.) After having the stomach flu, then watching my husband suffer through the flu and then having a bunch of other stuff going on, I was just NOT in the mood. But I finally forced myself to be in the mood and ripped through the last half of the book. And it was worth it.

You already know what I’m going to say: Blah blah blah, great sense of history and place this, blah blah blah, interesting introduction of new characters from history and legend, this time namely Shakespeare, Billy The Kid, and Palamedes (who I’m going to have to read some back story on, because I wasn’t completely sure of the reference) that, blah blah blah, while still rounding out characters he’s already introduced (namely Scathach and Joan of Arc, both of whom I love by the way), Blah blah blah, it still drags when the narrative is centered around the twins, and we’re done here.

Not quite though. What I really love about this book and the series as a whole is the different layers of mystery that we unfold throughout the story just to have another heaped on. Just when our understanding was that there were Elders and Next Generation, another layer of intrigue is added when The Archon are introduced and are said to predate the Elders. It ratchets up the mystery and there is further intrigue when it is made clear that there isn’t a straight hierarchy between the three. Thanks to politics and who knows what else, the lines are blurred between the three.

The other thing I love about the book and the series as a whole that I haven’t mentioned up to this point are the author’s notes at the end of the book. Scott, who has clearly gone to great lengths to research the places that almost become characters in and of themselves in these books, gives the reader a small reward at the end of the book by telling you more about those places. The back stories are nearly as fascinating as the books themselves and are well worth the read. In the last book he talked about The Catacombs underneath Paris. In this book, he covers the history behind Stonehenge and discusses how its formation and its importance is just as much a mystery as the books he’s writing. I love that!

Because reading this book, whether it be related to what I had going on or otherwise, felt like more of a chore than usual, I’m dinging this book down a half a letter grade. But overall, still enjoyable and I’m dying to see where the series goes from here! B