Review: The Child Thief

The Child Thief by Brom
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: American Spy

American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars



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Review: A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II

A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Review: To Shape a Dragon's Breath

     

  Non-Spoiler Summary:

    Aneques is a young woman from the island of Masquapaug.  She is her mother’s oldest daughter and stands to someday inherit her mother’s  home, lands, and her place in their society.   She is content and happy in her life.  As she is out gathering oysters with her siblings, she happens upon a wild dragon.  When she returns to the spot the next day to pray, Aneques finds an egg.  She has no idea when she takes the egg home that is breaking the law. Her people once lived among dragons.  Dragons are part of their tradition and heritage.  Aneques has no idea that when the dragon hatches and bonds itself to her that the she has committed a grievous taboo in the eyes of the nearby colonizers that will put unwanted attention on Aneques and her village.  

There are no dragon-tamers left on Maquapaug.  So Aneques is advised by her brother to attend the nearby dragon training school in the city on the mainland.  There she can learn about how to take care of her new baby dragon. Going to the school will give Aneques and her dragon, Kasaqua, a chance to learn how to help their village grow and thrive.  Not going to the school could lead to Kasaqua being killed or taken away from Aneques.  So Aneques attends Kuiper’s Academy of Natural Philosophy and Skilltakraft.  But once she’s there she learns that if she doesn’t pass the final exam she may never be allowed to leave.  

"To Shape a Dragon’s Breath" is a slow paced beautifully written story about a young woman coming of age in an unfamiliar place while daring to stay true to her culture and beliefs.  It’s "Harry Potter" meets "How to Train your Dragon" told through the POV of a native girl among steam-punk Vikings.  

I would recommend this story to any YA fiction reader who feels out of place, and under appreciated.  

About the Author

    Monniquill Blackgoose is an indigenous woman with a lot to say about her work, her culture, and her inspirations.   She is an enrolled member of the Seaconck Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts and Rohode Islands.  She a descendant of the Ousamequin Massasoit peoples.

  You can learn more about Monniquill in this intriguing interview with Locus Magazine 

Spoiler-ish Review

What I liked

I like how Blackgoose told the story of history of this world though a series of characters telling their own stories.   It was a clever way to show that here mythology is history and history is religion in this world.     I also really enjoyed the different steampunk settings and how society is wrapped around who can and can’t own a dragon.

  

What I loved -

  

Image by Hifzhan Graphics

    The diversity of characters.  Moniquill didn’t shy away from diversity in this novel.   A black female indentured servant becomes a love interest.  So does the rude handsome native boy.  Our MC befriends an autistic aristocrat and thereby extension his sister.  The only other female character Anequs meets at the school is neither her instant best friend, nor her mean girl enemy.  She is a true to life daughter of a wealthy family who wants to stay blended into society, but Anequs challenges her roommate’s goals and ideals.  The girls have to work at their relationship, but at the end of this first book in the series, they are more like acquaintances than friends.  

What I disliked

The Pacing (at first). It can be easy for book reviewers, like myself, to become impatient.  We are often reading quickly, hurrying ahead mentally to guess at the plot, beats, and twists.  We rush through because there is always another book in our cue awaiting our attention.  That was how I was feeling as I crashed into “To Shape a Dragon’s Breath”.  

I was, at first, trusted to find myself being slowed down by the patient unfolding of a coming of age school drama…with dragons. I was expecting battles and complicated senerios, tragic misunderstandings and characters that had a difficult time explaining themselves.

Image by Yulia Gapeenka

This is book was not that at all.  Halfway through the first act my brain sort of took a sigh of relief and I realized that I was beginning to appricate the slow pacing, and the low stacks after all the horrors I’d trudged through in the other novels.  I realized that the novel itself was being told like a live storytelling fable.  And then, the Aniques slapped a rich little white boy for being a jerk and the story the began to take off.  

I realized that Anique being patient and well-spoken and communicating her thoughts clearly while going along with the culture around her was the point.  Because even though she’s doing everything right her life is still threatened.  She has to be an example for her people but she’s only a teenager, she doesn’t know all the traps set by adults to win political points in Anglish culture.  Despite doing everything she is suppose to, she is still treated like a savage.  And when she attempts to open the doors of diversity for others like herself,  people are killed.

So not really a dislike anymore, but it bugged me for ages.    

I really disliked of the descriptions of the lessons in some places.  The detailed descriptions of Skilltacraft in the first class was agonizing.  I appreciate  how much research in chemistry, languages, and language histories,  Blackgoose must have put into all of this.  My old brain was very resistant to learn a new language…but as this novel is aimed at much younger and fluid brains than mine I will defer to the target audience of whether or not this worked.  

Taking it Personally 

 This novel was personal to me.  Blackgoose illustrates exactly how it feels to be a minority person in an all white setting.  The story reminds me of times when I was the only black girl in the room, or the class, or on the job.  Well established white boys felt at liberty to say all sort of things to me - some out of genuine curiosity, others to get a rise out of me.  They all expected my genuine reaction to amuse or entertain them in some way - none of them understood that I could not give my genuine opinion because of the inherit threat they're attention imposed.   

Anequs does nothing wrong but she is still reprimanded for things that seem small when other characters do them.  She, a fifteen year old girl, is still held responsible for the irrational fears of adults that she's never met.  Her missteps could have dire consequences for her friends, family, and her dragon.  And yet they constantly get her name wrong, insult her culture, hair and cloths - but she's expected to grin and bear it.  

I've never had my parent's lives threatened. But I have lost jobs, friends, and  promotions because my behavior some how threatened my white female bosses.  I have been poorly trained for jobs in much the same Anequs was poorly prepared for the cultural exceptions of the school.  I knew how she felt when she said it felt like everyone expected me to already know the rules.   The problem with this is that you are not given grace for learning when you are a minority.  You not given a chance to figure it out.  

 

  When I was made an assistant manager at Sherwin-Williams my manager missed my first three weeks on the job.  She had a funeral that took up one week, then two weeks of paid vacation to grieve her loss.  When she came back she wrote me up for the mistakes I'd made in her absence.  In the end she wrote me up six times in four months.  She never talked to me about what I was doing wrong.  She never told me in the moment what mistakes I was making, but she told everyone else.  She created an environments of secrets and whispers and eye signals that everyone but me was privledged to.  When I finally, after four months of this, got mad about this and spoke she cringed and hid and cried that she thought I was going to hit her.  

    The General Manager came to our store to find out what the problem was with us.   She told him that I wasn't very well trained, which was funny because her husband was my training manager for the assistant manager program.  She told him  that she couldn't talk to me because she was afraid of me - but I promise that I was just as polite, well spoken, and straightforward as Anequs in this story.  When it was my turn to speak I told him of the environment that I'd been living in and he asked me why I felt that way. I said racism.  He stopped me mid-sentence and said that we don't use the "r" word here.  He asked me what should be done.  I asked to be moved to another store.  He agreed then demoted me from assistant manager back down to full-time employee of another store.  The official reason was that I could not handle the responsibilities of the job.    I kept my assistant-manager pay for three months then lost that too when the G.M. was promoted to Regional Manager.  My former manager faced no consequences even though it was well known that she'd treated her Hispanic assistant manager the same way.  

The microagressions and the straight-up aggressions that Anequs suffers in this story were real relatable.  Time and again I brought back to the above story, and others experiences I have dealing with majority races.   I hope every YA reader eventually finds this book and learns something about privilege and how manners can be a blindfold.  

Recommendations

If you like this book you might also enjoy the sequel: 

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 I'm Porsche B. Yeary and I’ll see you on the next page!

Review: To Build a Dream

To Build a Dream by Greg Hickey
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I like the writing. Greg Hickey is an excellent writer. I really enjoyed the transitions. The scenes move seamlessly between the real and the surreal worlds. I appreciated learning so much about cancer, and what cancer patients go through. I found my-self really rooting for Tim and hoping he makes me. He felt like a real person who'd lost himself in the cooperate grind and is now having to find himself or else be lost forever in this maze of a dream.

Recommend to friends and family supporting someone through chemo therapy.

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Review: The Event Horizon Murder By Greg Hickey

The Event Horizon Murder by Greg Hickey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

   I really enjoyed this novella.  I love mysteries both cozy and noir.  The Event Horizon Murder is very The Maltese Falcon meets Blade Runner. 

   The Event Horizon Murder is a dark gritty hard-boiled drama set in a Blade Runner cityscape where every part of the city is wired with surveillance cameras except for one district,  Stockyard Park a.k.a. the Event Horizon.  Of course, the Event Horizon is the perfect place to get away with murder.  And it's Detective Marcus Carver's good fortune to land the case when the son of a wealthy family turns up dead but dry of clues.   Caver's asshole boss expects him to work miracles but every lead races to a dead end - until he discovers one mis-labled clue.  

Greg Hickey 

 Seriously, anyone who enjoys old time radio detective stories, CSI procedurals, or futuristic griddy noir in general will enjoy diving into the world of this hard-boiled noir dystopian fantasy.  It's a short read fifty-seven pages.  Great for a quick weekend trip, or busy moms who don't get a lot time for long novels.  

If you enjoyed this review please check out my book club discussions at blog at: https://pbjellybell.blogspot.com/

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A Lesson in YA Horror: Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare
My rating: 4 of 5 star

I almost didn’t read this book.  Clowns in the cornfield sound clinche’ and like trashy body horror shock value pulpy bullshit.   While I wasn’t “entirely” wrong - about the cliche themes - this story does take place in a small midwestern town full corn and involves a lot of gory kills  - I was wrong about it being shock value pulpy bullshit.  

This book has actual value and I’m glade to recommend it to fans of YA horror.  I also think a few adults could learn a thing or two about from this novel.    

The Story

   As I said Clowns in the Cornfield is set in a small rural midwestern town where everyone grew up knowing each other.  Then there’s the new girl.  Quine is accidentally swept into the tension of the town as their seems to be a war between the adults and teens in town. This tension bubbles over when a prank goes wrong on founders day.  

   

 Likes!  
Troupy without being cliche’.  

  This novel has all the familiar teen slasher tropes without being totally cliche’.  

The popular kids are not needlessly cruel assholes.  The nerds and younger kids are not helpless victims.  The punks are cool. The new girl isn’t picked up for no reason.  The closeted gay couple aren’t the main topics of gossip around town.  

This doesn’t save any of them.  They are still hunted down and and slain as though they were the same irritating assholes from Carrie, Friday the 13^th, or Nightmare on Elm Street.    It’s as though the old guard takes offense to these changes and tries to take them all out.  The meanest person in the school is a teacher.  And the biggest bullies in town are the same ones you’d call for help.    

The town is itself is divided down the middle between the adults and the teenagers who hope to someday take over the town and make it a better place.  Then the clown, who is the town’s founder, shows up to make his opinion known.  He appears to believe things are better without so many opinionated kids and their cellphones.

  Unfortunately for him, “the final girl” is a quick learner at the rifle.  

 Loved

Suspenseful without being gory.  

The kids help each other, they fight and flee they do dumb stuff, they do smart stuff, but all of it is believable things you’d do in a panic.  They fight back.  

The clown kills in every way BUT a gun and some of those ways are bloody.  So a blood thirsty audience will get it’s kicks - but the story isn’t torchere porn.  It’s not graphic for the fun of it.  Also, this story in no way glorifies the killer, or makes what he’s doing seem cool and justified.  The writer definitely seemed aware of the current temperature of the public towards mass violence.

This story could be extremely triggering for mass violence in a public setting, at a party.  But the writer breaks the tension in key places by either having the characters acknowledge this, or having someone be saved.  As it’s about to become too much, the story is turned on it’s ear all together into something totally unexpected.  

Disliked

The story is great and the explanations work for the horror story universe but some of the reasoning didn’t totally make since to me.  I wanted more details, more clarity on what exactly, specifically, motivated the killing of some many teenagers.    

Most questions were answered, but some of the ones that weren’t bothered me.   .

  Like why was Col blamed for the death of his sister?  He didn’t make her go up there, not did he make her jump.  He was at his party.  He pulled a stunt, and halfway through the fall she…went slack? Or something like that.    It appeared that someone filmed her getting hit in the head before she jumped right?  Who did that?

  What was up with he adult’s reactions to that footage?  It was an accident.  

Was there a specific reason - a single event that made every literally scared to see teens with camera phones?  

At the  the town just goes back to business as usual after the founding family, the sherif, the teachers, parents and who knows who else attempted to kill off a whole generation? And the kids are just pranking the shell shocked adults with camera phones after?  

Adam Cesare

The Author

Adam Cesare  love horror cinema.  He runs Project: Black T-Shirt, a YouTube review show where he talks horror films and pairs them with reading suggestions.  Clowns in the Cornfield has won a Brum Stoker Aware for Superior Achievement in Young Adult Novel of 2020.  Follow the Amazon Associates Links below if you're interested in checking out more of Adam's work.  .  

Conclusion:

Clowns in the Cornfield is a modern teen slasher for the present 2025 YA audience. Trigger warning for mass violence breaking out at party. 

It follows all the tropes of being a teen slasher, but somehow avoids being  cliche’.  The gore is bloody.  The killer seems an unstoppable horrifying shit.  And the deaths are shocking, and horrible.  But there is no torchere porn, no glorified meanness, and no justified slaughter.  Everyone who dies is a good or decent person.  Even though you come to sort of understand the motives, this book should not be a blueprint for some sick mind.  If anything it might be a cure - because when does a trend stop being cool….?

Recommendations

Zillinials and Boomers for sure. 

                    Here are some other books by Adam Cesare for you try.  Please use my Amazon Associates links below to buy these books on Amazon or Audible.  Using my links really helps the blog grow and encourages me to keep doing this.  If however, you don't want to feed the ever growing consumer monster that is Amazon, please considering borrowing these books from your local library.  You can also use the library's free audio book service Libby to listen on the go.  Our libraries really need out support!    Enjoy!

                            

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