Book Review: Doctor Who 50th Anniversary Editions' Ten Little Aliens

Of all the things you might want to do in the Universe, apparently bumping into the Schirr is NOT one of them. After all, Schirr are nasty, body-snatching creatures hell bent on the destruction of the human race, permanently at war with Earth’s far-flung outposts. At least that’s what the human’s elite Anti-Terrorists forces believe. But the First Doctor – Dr. Who, that is --- and his companions Ben and Polly are not completely convinced. That’s the confusing landscape into which the reader is dropped in the first of the Dr. Who 50th Anniversary Edition novels, Ten Little Aliens by Stephen Cole.

The TARDIS lands First Doctor, Polly and Ben in the 30th Century, on an asteroid that appears to be the final resting place of 10 alien corpses, who just happen to be the most wanted criminals in the known universe – a Schirr terrorist known as DeCaster and some of his followers. The TARDIS crew is surprised by a group of cadets from an elite anti-terrorist military academy who have arrived at the planetoid for military exercises, along with their training instructors, Haunt (a female veteran of the Schirr wars) and her assistant, Shel. First Doctor begins to suspect a trap when half the asteroid splits off, taking the cadets’ ship with it. With the TARDIS mysteriously locked, the group is cut off from the Universe.

And then cadets and corpses begin to go missing in pairs. And did I mention the creepy little cherub statues scattered about the asteroid? One of the party must be responsible for the disappearances – which turn out to be murders. Is this beginning to sound a bit familiar?

I love classic mysteries. And I love Dr. Who. So the idea of reviewing a Dr. Who homage novel based on Agatha Christie’s classic Ten Little Indians (perhaps better known in the US as And Then There Were None) was pretty irresistible. And I wasn’t disappointed.

But I will admit that I was confused at times. The sci-fi gadgets and pyrotechnics muddied the narrative waters for me. I felt like I had to spend a lot of time figuring out what was actually going on in the futuristic physical world. Maybe this was meant to put me in the place of Ben and Polly? I did admire the author’s attempt to provide multiple viewpoints for the same events, without giving the reader an idea of which of the narrators was reliable. But the narrator transitions were accompanied by all kinds of directions that were distracting, and interfered with the flow of the book for me.

Cole’s novel definitely reflects its early 20th century British origins, which means there’s a good bit of post-colonial angst. Shade, one of the cadets, is notable for his Earth-born origins – he’s in turns respected and reviled for his unique position. There’s also a politically correct spin on the old “terrorists vs. freedom fighters” question that is pretty interesting. But the subtexts were only revealed in bits and pieces, and some of them were never fully explained, so at some points I thought the backstory actually detracted from what was in fact a really interesting Who adventure.

Still, for all its “fan-fiction” flaws – and all my fan quibbling – this was a fun book. Like the television series, it required attention to detail. Adding First Doctor and companions to the Christie set-up was a neat creative twist, despite the unevenness in the narration that the addition entailed. Who fans will definitely love this book. I can’t say the same natural affinity exists for Christie fans, because the mystery element really takes a back seat to the sci-fi. But the combination was really fun for me!

I read this book as part of a TLC book tour, and received a free copy of the book – and a companion volume, Whoology -- in return for my honest opinion. Thanks, Lisa, for including me on the tour. For other opinions on this book – and all the books in the anniversary series – follow the links here.

Greek Chicken and Grain Burgers: Col’s VB6 Recipe of the Week

I'm a huge Mark Bittman fan, and my plan for getting back to Weekend Cooking was actually a review of his new book, VB6, which outlines the eating plan he described in his previous book, Food Matters. But then I read the reviews of the book, and many noted there wasn't much in there except a more persuasive case for his vegan-during-the-day-omnivore-at-night concept, and some very easy recipes based on it. And since I've been making an attempt -- sometimes successfully, sometimes not so much -- to incorporate VB6 into our lives since I read the previous book, I didn't think I could justify the cost of (yet another) book. So instead, I thought I'd share where I took one of his ultra-flexible Meat and Grain Burger recipe from Food Matters. Both my carnivorous husband and omnivorous daughter LOVED these, and they'll definitely be finding their way to the grill throughout the summer!

Greek Chicken and Grain Burgers 
1 6 oz. bag baby spinach
2 tbsp. olive oil
12 oz ground chicken thighs
1 cup rolled oats
2 ounce block feta, diced finely
¼ cup minced red onion
1 clove garlic, minced
1 egg
2 tbsp. ketchup
1 tbsp. Greek seasoning
Salt and pepper, to taste
8 small whole wheat rolls
Tzatziki for serving

Heat the oil in a large pan over medium heat. Don't dry spinach -- just toss in hot pan, and cook until the spinach is wilted. Set aside to cool, then wrap in a clean kitchen cloth and twist to release as much water as possible. Chop the little spinach block that remains finely, and toss with all ingredients through salt and pepper. Refrigerate for an hour, then form eight small patties. Grill until cooked through (165 degrees), and serve on whole wheat buns with tzatziki sauce -- or ketchup, if you're my daughter!

These make small burgers, so they don't dry out during cooking -- kids will likely eat one, but my husband eats 2.

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. Thanks to Beth Fish Reads for hosting!

Book Review: FLAUBERT'S PARROT by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot is a strange book, indeed. I spent the first half thinking I was reading a book about a literary obsession when I suddenly realized I was reading a book about a widower trying to understand his relationship with his late wife. Talk about confused! Several months have gone by since I read it, and in retrospect I believe one story was actually told through the other. But somehow I can’t quite decide whether or not I think Barnes pulled it off.

Let’s start with the fact that although I have read Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, it was a long time ago. And that is the only Flaubert novel I have read. I have not read, most importantly, A Simple Heart, also known as The Parrot which winds up being central to the plot – or at least what there is of a plot. I had no idea about Flaubert’s family life, his philosophy, or his, shall we say, eccentricities. That didn’t actually detract from my enjoyment of the novel, because I found reading the biographical bits on Flaubert really fascinating. But it certainly may have impacted my ability to decipher the story.

The ostensible plot involves a retired British doctor and Flaubert aficionado, Geoffrey Braithwaite, touring through France in search of the answer to a mystery: which of two ancient stuffed parrots claiming to be so is actually the one that stood on Flaubert’s desk while he wrote A Simple Heart? What, in a nutshell, is the inspiration for genius, appeared to be the question to which Braithwaite was seeking an answer. But what the asynchronous narrative slowly reveals is that Braithwaite believes understanding Flaubert’s life and inspirations will help him understand his own domestic story – one that has the small, sad dimensions of a Flaubertian tragedy.

The book was slow-going, but it wasn’t as heavy as it sounds. In fact, there are quite a few very funny bits. One of the most interesting chapters in the book is entitled “Braithwaite’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas,” which encapsulates the conventional wisdom about Flaubert and his work with tongue-in-cheek encyclopedia entries:

WHORES: Necessary in the nineteenth century for the contraction of syphilis, without which no one could claim genius. Wearers of the red badge of courage include Flaubert, Daudet, Maupassant, Jules de Goncourt, Baudelaire, etc. Were there any writers unafflicted by it? If so, they were probably homosexual. (Kindle location 2525)

The book is beautifully written, I’ll say that. But there was something of Joyce’s Ulysses in this to me, so think with literary illusions that I couldn’t get a fix on the book I was actually supposed to be reading. The book ought to come with The Parrot as a pre-req – maybe I would have understood it that way!

Back from hiatus with THE LOVE SHACK -- and not a Chrysler or a B-52 in sight

As anyone familiar with this blog knows, I’ve been on hiatus for some time. I didn’t actually mean to go on hiatus – it just happened. We went to Shanghai, my daughter went to college, I went on sabbatical, my mom got sick. I’ve certainly been reading – as always, it’s been a huge comfort. But I just couldn’t find the time and energy to share my thoughts. It became stress, and not fun, and that’s exactly what I didn’t want when I started this blog. So I stepped back – and vegged.

Around January, I realized I was getting antsy, and had some things to share. But I held back from jumping back in to the book blogging world – I felt detached from a community I had been part of, and I didn’t know how to jump back in. So I waffled, which is like vegging, but with the addition of conflicted thought.

But then I got an email about a TLC tour that was way off my normal reading radar – a beach romance, for goodness sake. And I thought to myself, “Maybe that’s just the thing. Read something you haven’t read since you were a teenager, and see if it gives you something new to say.”

Which is the long way round to explaining why my usually lit/fic, historical novel and mystery blog is featuring a romance for my return to blogdom. A romance called, The Love Shack, no less. (Cue  the B-52s, my favorite 80s band).                                                                                                                                                            

All I can say was, it was a reading vacation. It was fun, decadent, and not terribly demanding.

Christie Ridgway gives the reader a story more Georgette Heyer than Nora Roberts. There’s lots of back story, lots of emotion, lots of complications and even a rumored necklace with lots of jewels. Oh, and there’s romance too. But it’s way more cerebral than I thought it would be. Seriously.    

The story is as simple at its heart as you might expect. Gage is a photojournalist who books some downtime in the place he happily vacationed as a child – Beach House No. 9. The owner’s little brat of a daughter, Skye, is now the owner of the place – and predictably gorgeous. He’s been working behind enemy lines in the war on terror. She’s been dealing with her own war on peace at home. Both Gage and Skye have incidents in their past that tend to keep them isolated – but they are also absolutely drawn to each other. You know they belong together from the first chapter – it’s a romance, for goodness sake – but Ridgway keeps you wondering if they’re going to figure it out before calamity strikes.

The Love Shack is a good beach book: comfortable and escapist, but just a little unexpected. Ridgway definitely channeled the Regency Romance aesthetic in a contemporary setting. The book was honestly far more restrained than I had expected. If you are looking for a fun, contemporary romance with an interesting set of supporting characters, consider putting The Love Shack in your beach bag this summer. No one is going to confuse it with Anna Karenina -- or The Gulag Archipelago for that matter* – but it’s good, reasonably clean fun.

I was supposed to receive a copy of this book in return for my honest opinion, but had so much trouble with NetGalley that I bought the book myself. Still, many thanks, as always, to Lisa at TLC for including me on this tour.  For other opinions about this title, follow this link.

*Deperado Penguin knows this to be true!

Book Review: THE FORRESTS by Emily Perkins

I love big novels about small things. Because no matter how strange the events and circumstances surrounding individuals are, it’s a person’s relationship to those events that imbues them with meaning in the end. I think my predilection for those kinds of small insights in writing explains why I was so totally captivated by Emily Perkins’ latest novel, The Forrests.

Lee and Frank Forrest grew up in wealthy households, but by the time we meet them the money they had counted on has been squandered away. They leave the US with their four children – Michael, Evelyn, Dorothy and Ruth – for an unconventional life in New Zealand. The third-person narrative focuses on the two middle children, Evelyn and Dot, and their attempts to make a life for themselves despite the uncertain, hand-to-mouth existence their parents have provided – a lifestyle that seems to be fine with Frank, but which is increasingly difficult for the children’s mother, Lee. It also focuses on Daniel, a child taken in by the Forrests, whose presence at first anchors the family, and then pulls it apart.

The Forrests live a patched-together life, which Perkins emphasizes in the patched-together chapters of the novel. I’m not usually of a fan of non-linear narrative, but in this case the device gave me real sympathy with the Forrest siblings, whose circumstances were constantly changing because of their parents’ inability to plan for them. I had to figure where I was and what had happened to get me there at the beginning of each chapter, reorienting myself to new circumstances like an often-uprooted child must have to do. At times, I admit, it was slow going, but it kept me focused, trying to understand their world.

To say that The Forrests is beautifully written doesn’t really do it justice. Reading it is like driving a circuitous route through varied terrain, each vista totally gorgeous, but not wholly connected to the last. Perkins’ words spill together, leaving the reader awash in emotion, stretching to reach the plot beneath it:

The mention of his name made Eve want to rip a hunk of grass from the earth. This could not be done, and nothing could be said to her sister. Better to bury Daniel because face it, she’d had no right to him and she’d wanted him for so long and followed him across the world and by anyone’s standards she probably deserved to have him leave her but she could never, never tell Dot. How to know whether the secrecy – really the lying -- came from love, or shame, or the sheer envy of having been the one left out by those two for all that time? They’d never talked about it but she knew, like she knew Michael being a pot fiend when their parents insisted it was just that he was shy. Could she judge whether or not Daniel had been worth it? She was frightened that, if she looked in her heart, she would discover that he was, and would have to face up to what that meant, now he was gone. “Actually, I should get home. I’m on dinner. What should I make?”

I cannot recommend this book highly enough for lovers of contemporary literary fiction. Perkins is inventive and daring with language, describing in extraordinary detail what might have been ordinary, even tawdry lives, if they had not been examined closely. I will definitely be seeking out her previous books.

I read this book – albeit in delayed fashion – as part of TLC Book Tour. I received a galley of the book in return for my honest opinion. Many thanks to Lisa Munley at TLC for shifting around some deadlines to accommodate my unexpectedly difficult schedule this summer. I’m glad to be back blogging, and I’m looking forward to seeing what has been going on while I’ve been away!

For other reviews of this book, check the TLC links here.

Tuesday Intro: Carlos Ruiz Zafón's THE PRISONER OF HEAVEN

Here is the opening paragraph from Carlos Ruiz Zafón’s The Prisoner of Heaven,the third of his Cemetery of Forgotten Books novels. The first two, The Shadow of the Wind and The Angel’s Game, were worldwide bestsellers, and have been translated from the original Spanish into at least eight languages. The series is fascinating in that it is not meant to be experienced chronologically – you can read the books in any order.

I love Ruiz Zafón’s atmospheric writing, and the way he makes Barcelona, a city I love, a character in his novels. I will be coming back to this one for a complete review in a few weeks, but I can already tell you it is one of my favorite books of 2012!

Barcelona, December 1957

That year at Christmas time, every morning dawned laced with frost under leaden skies. A bluish hue tinged the city and people walked by, wrapped up to their ears and drawing lines of vapour with their breath in the cold air. Very few stopped to gaze at the shop window of Sempere & Sons; fewer still ventured inside to ask for that lost book that had been waiting for them all their lives and whose sale, poetic fantasies aside, would have contributed to shoring up the bookshop’s ailing finances.

What do you think? Would you jump into the series here?

And if you’re looking for inspiration, why not head over to Bibliophile by the Sea and check out other First Chapter, First Paragraph Tuesday Intro ideas! Thanks, Diane, for hosting!

I am reading this book as part of a TLC Book Tour, and received a free copy of the book in return for my honest opinion. You can check out other opinions here.

Weekend Cooking: Super Simple White Sangria

It's hard to believe we got home from China less than 48 hours before our daughter graduated from high school--and we threw a party for 40 people! Obviously, anything we did had to be easy -- so I whipped up a few batches of this sangria for the thirsty grown-ups who came to celebrate with us. It's always a huge hit, so I thought I'd share for those with summertime parties coming up!

Mango White Wine Sangria

2 liters Chardonnay wine (we just bought one of the huge Yellowtail bottles – it was fine)

2 cups Triple Sec

1 liter Goya Mango Nectar

1/4 cup lime juice

Frozen peaches, strawberries and mangoes for floating in the jug

Blackberries, strawberries, apples and limes for garnish

Have all ingredients cold, including Triple sec. Mix all ingredients aside from garnishes in a large drink dispenser (preferably one with a spout on the bottom) 3-4 hours before serving, so the flavors can come together. Serve garnishes in bowls on the side, so everyone can make the drinks "their way." (You can also make up pitchers, as you see in the picture.)

Weekend Cooking is open to anyone who has any kind of food-related post to share: Book (novel, nonfiction) reviews, cookbook reviews, movie reviews, recipes, random thoughts, gadgets, fabulous quotations, photographs. If your post is even vaguely foodie, feel free to grab the button and link up anytime over the weekend. Please link to your specific post, not your blog's home page. Thanks to Beth Fish Reads for hosting!