Hola, all! I know, long time no post. I'm super busy with my daughter & her school thanks to Halloween. Trunk-or-Treating is tonight! But anyway, what I really am posting about is to say I'm looking for some awesome affiliates to chain link some of our blogs together & possibly get in on doing some group blog events.
If you're interested or have questions, don't leave a comment -- please email me!
In My Mailbox is a meme hosted by The Story Siren.
I haven't done one of these in a long time. I usually don't do them because I get things so sporadically & have found that right after I create a post I get a bunch of things that I didn't have before that I could have posted. Well you get the picture. But anyhow, I thought I'd share this time because I was given some great books by some awesome people.
Gifts From The Fall Book Exchange
Gifts from Friends
ARCs For Morning Light Book Tours
For Review
Purchased
The False Princess by Eilis O'Neil
Release Date: January 25, 2011
Publisher: EgmontUSA
Pages: 336
Reading level: Young Adult
My Rating: 
Princess and heir to the throne of Thorvaldor, Nalia's led a privileged life at court. But everything changes when it's revealed, just after her sixteenth birthday, that she is a false princess, a stand-in for the real Nalia, who has been hidden away for her protection. Cast out with little more than the clothes on her back, the girl now called Sinda must leave behind the city of Vivaskari, her best friend, Keirnan, and the only life she's ever known.
Sinda is sent to live with her only surviving relative, an aunt who is a dyer in a distant village. She is a cold, scornful woman with little patience for her newfound niece, and Sinda proves inept at even the simplest tasks. But when Sinda discovers that magic runs through her veins - long-suppressed, dangerous magic that she must learn to control - she realizes that she can never learn to be a simple village girl.
Returning to Vivaskari for answers, Sinda finds her purpose as a wizard scribe, rediscovers the boy who saw her all along, and uncovers a secret that could change the course of Thorvaldor's history, forever.
-- from Goodreads.com
A case of a fantastic idea, poorly executed. Which is one of my pet peeves where books are concerned. I wanted to like this book, I really did. The plot was one that should have been truly enthralling and satisfying. It would have been had anything actually happened. Don't get me wrong, things happened. The problem with them happening was that the narrator, Sinda, was so stuck in her head and so easily distracted by her own thoughts that in the middle of almost every scene of action she stops to think. She stops to think in mid-conversation too. Then after paragraph after paragraph of her meandering thoughts she'll return to the conversation as though no time had passed. Faced with dire danger, Sinda stops telling the immediate story to reflect on her personal woes, misgivings, and self-loathing. All of which leaves the narrative in a choppy, disjointed state.
Her frequent side-trips into her head also leave us with very little information on the other characters around her. There were hints that characters like Kiernan and others were really interesting people. I would have really enjoyed getting to know them better. Except Sinda was so preoccupied with herself and her thoughts that all we really get to know is bits and pieces intermittently. Afterthoughts and shadows of personalities. Her own personality is flat on the pages. She is a girl who mostly worries and makes plans without much thought of anything else including missing her parents, which she never does even though they'd been her parents for 16 years! I can't imagine why Kiernan would be so interested in a girl who strays off into her own thoughts more often than she interacts and has very little personality to speak of.
The moment Mika stepped onto the scene in the last third of the story it was like a breath of fresh air and I knew immediately it was her story we should have been hearing. I wanted to be inside her head. She was simple, unmuddled, and feisty. She was a girl of action and it would have made so much more sense for Kiernan to have loved her than Sinda. It's a shame that we weren't treated to more of Mika.
When there should be dialogue, Sinda is thinking. When there should be action, Sinda is talking. There is a long scene of exposition toward the end of the book that is mostly dialogue between Sinda and the villain. They have a nice long chat to get it all out in the open. Even in the final moments, when the traps have been sprung and Sinda faces off for the last time with the villain it's done in thoughts and dialogue. Almost no action whatsoever takes place in the scene. In fact, the actions we do get to read are strangely written and happen so much in the middle of a bunch of thinking that I almost missed it.
And that dangerous magic? We see very little of it. In fact, we're told it's dangerous but we don't really see much that would indicate that. Her first burst of the magic does almost nothing and leads to part of the story ending abruptly with no satisfying resolution.
Basically this book read like the inner thoughts of a boring person not doing much. If you took all the excess and tangent thoughts out of the story and shaved back the dialogue so that the action became more action-y it would have been just long enough to be a bedtime fairy tale. The sort with little detail meant for young children who wouldn't really understand it anyway.
I'm not usually so hard on books but I think my problem with this one is that it promised so much with the fabulous plot idea and delivered so little. The idea was squandered and that made me sad. And because I'm so hard on the book I will not be posting this review anywhere else I usually post reviews. This is pretty much a rant of personal opinion rather than a strict review. I can only hope that the author will continue honing her craft and finding ways to execute her good ideas in a much more satisfying manner.
Alright. Just pausing to rant for a moment. A couple of my pet peeves came up a lot lately while visiting other blogs while preparing the Blogospheric Newsletter that went out recently. They are very minor in the grander scheme of things but they kind of get under my skin when I'm trying to do/find something.
1. No Tags Blogs with no tags on their posts make me sad because if I want to find all the posts about say "dystopian fiction" on a sci-fi-ish blog I can't. Not if it doesn't use tags. And I'll be honest, I really don't want to scroll through everything else to find what I'm looking for on a tagless blog. Yes, I suffer from a need for immediate gratification. What can I say, I'm human! But normally this isn't really an issue because I want to read whatever is on a blog if I'm visiting it. Just not when I'm trying to find current contests or interesting (non-review) posts for my newsletter!
2. Images Linked -- To Themselves I don't know how many times it happened in the past few days as I was trying to find out about contests or festivals or other things by clicking what looked like a button linked to the information I wanted. Except when I clicked I went straight to ... the image in a new tab. Um. This is a good way to NOT get information to your readers. It's counterproductive & can be easily remedied. For the love of my sanity, please link contest buttons to the contest posts & not to themselves. Please? *whimper*
Okay. Unpause. Please return to your regularly scheduled non-ranty goodness. Love, peace, & chicken grease, as they say.
You may or may not know this about me, but I have an addiction to collecting piggies. In all shapes & sizes, I have probably almost 100 in total. So when I noticed the Mini Challenge for Collections over at Princess Bookie's site, I just had to flash a few pictures of my collection & share them.
This doesn't even cover it really. I just gathered what I could without waking my daughter. And well, even if I don't win, it's fun to share this with you. I hope you'll enter & share with me too! I know I'm not the only one who collects something!
