Thursday Quotables: Marine Biology

Posted in Thursday Quotables by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Welcome to Thursday Quotables! This weekly feature is the place to highlight a great quote, line, or passage discovered during your reading each week. Whether it’s something funny, startling, gut-wrenching, or just really beautifully written, Thursday Quotables is where my favorite lines of the week will be, and you’re invited to join in!

A little programming note: While I’m mostly back to weekly postings, I find I’m not at 100% yet! I’ll continue to post Thursday Quotables most weeks. If I happen to skip a week when you have a post to share, feel free to link up to whichever TQ post here is most recent. Many thanks!

Onward with this week’s Thursday Quotable:

Marine Biology by Gail Carriger
(published 2010)

When there’s too much seriousness in my life, I know I can reach for a Gail Carriger story to lift my spirits. I originally read Marine Biology when it came out, but as there’s now a related novel, The Sumage Solution, I figured this was a good time to read it again. Marine Biology is a cute, sweet, supernatural story — set in the modern world, not Carriger’s trademark steampunk Victorian society, but full of her wit and cleverness.

Here’s the opening paragraph, which makes more sense if you keep in mind that the main character is a gay werewolf scientist:

The problem, Alec thought gloomily, swishing a test-tube full of seawater, is that I’m unexpectedly alive. To be unexpectedly dead would be pleasingly simplistic. After all, he made up the statistic on the spot so that he would sound more learned in his own head, half of all deaths are unexpected. One is, to a certain degree, prepared to die unexpectedly. But when one expects to die at eighteen and instead finds oneself unexpectedly alive at twenty-four, there’s nothing for it but to be confused about everything.

What lines made you laugh, cry, or gasp this week? Do tell!

If you’d like to participate in Thursday Quotables, it’s really simple:

Write a Thursday Quotables post on your blog. Try to pick something from whatever you’re reading now. And please be sure to include a link back to Bookshelf Fantasies in your post (http://www.bookshelffantasies.com), if you’d be so kind!
Add your Thursday Quotables post link in the comments section below… and I’d love it if you’d leave a comment about my quote for this week too.
Be sure to visit other linked blogs to view their Thursday Quotables, and have fun!

Save

13Mar2016

Book Review: Fire Touched by Patricia Briggs

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

I love this series, truly – madly – deeply. Why do I even bother writing reviews anymore? You know the bottom line is going to be READ THIS BOOK… or for those who haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Mercedes Athena Thompson Hauptmann yet, READ THIS SERIES.

There. Done.

Okay, a little more, perhaps? Fire Touched is the 9th book in the always outstanding Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs. Mercy is a coyote shapeshifter as well as a talented VW mechanic. She’s a woman who never backs down and stands up for herself, her family, her pack, and pretty much anyone who needs her protection — and this is what lands her and the pack in a huge mess in Fire Touched.

Mercy is married to Adam, Alpha of the Columbia Basin Pack — a werewolf pack, that is. Mercy has just finished recovering from the life-threatening events of the previous book, Night Broken, when a new danger emerges. There’s a giant troll on the Cable Bridge of the Tri-Cities, and the local police are smart enough to call in the pack for help. Mercy and a bunch of werewolves battle the big nasty creature (who seems to enjoy smashing cars like an overgrown toddler playing with Matchbox toys) and ultimately defeat him — but Mercy takes the unprecedented step of declaring the Tri-Cities the territory of the pack and warning the fae that the pack will offer sanctuary to all who need their help.

At the moment, this includes Aiden, who looks like a bedraggled 10-year-old, but is in fact centuries old, having been taken into the fae’s unreachable domain of Underhill as a child and kept there ever since. Aiden has escaped, and now has gifts — including the ability to burn with his touch — and the fae would very much like to get their hands on him. By offering sanctuary, Mercy and the pack have set themselves up in direct opposition to all of the fae, and have potentially set the stage for the werewolf vs. fae war that Bran Cornick, leader of all of the North American werewolves, has been working so hard to avoid.

As the story progresses, we see the implications of Mercy’s declaration more and more. The pack will be under siege from all who question their right to claim territory. There are still pack members who resent Mercy’s membership in the pack, seeing as she’s a coyote and not a wolf, and Adam has finally had enough of the sniping. He declares that all werewolves in his pack will treat Mercy with respect, and if they say or do anything further against her, he will end them. And he means it. Strangely, this finally seems to bring the pack into a united team. A dire and unintended effect of the declaration is a break with Bran. Bran can’t afford to turn this into a global war against the fae, as his priority is always the good of ALL werewolves, so he formally breaks with Adam’s pack.

Sob. I love Bran. I love Adam. No sundering! Please work it out, guys.

Okay, so what did I think of this book? Well, as I said, I just pretty much heart everything about this series, so of course I loved Fire Touched too. That said, though, it’s probably not the best of the best, even though it’s awfully darn good.

What was missing for me here was the emphasis on relationships that my favorites in the series have. Mercy and Adam are in a really good place in their marriage, and I’m happy for them, but we don’t actually spend much time in this book just seeing them together. The pack isn’t terribly present in Fire Touched. Yes, they’re in the big fight on the bridge with the troll, and yes, we see the pack meeting where Adam draws his line in the sand about the pack’s treatment of Mercy. But beyond that, the pack is mostly just background. I’ve come to adore so many of the pack members — Ben, Warren, Darryl, Honey — but they’re not central to the plot here, and I missed them.

A lot of Fire Touched was about the fae and the Grey Lords, and how Mercy and Adam deal with their bargains and deceits. It was engaging, but I missed the pack drama and politics. On the plus side, it was nice to see Thomas Hao and Margaret Flanagan again (and if you don’t know who they are, read the story “Fairy Gifts” from the Shifting Shadows collection).

The bad thing about reading a new Mercy Thompson book the second it comes out is the loooooong wait for the next one! Okay, I’m done with Fire Touched — now what? Patricia Briggs’s website shows that there will be a 10th Mercy book and a 5th Alpha & Omega book (yay!), but no date is listed for either, and I assume whichever is next will be published in 2017.

So hey! If you haven’t read any Mercy books, or if you’re behind, now’s a great time to dive in and catch up! Trust me, you won’t be sorry.

Want to know more about the worlds of Patricia Briggs? Check out a few of my previous reviews:

Night Broken
Frost Burned
Shifting Shadows
Dead Heat

_________________________________________

The details:

Title: Fire Touched (Mercy Thompson, #9)
Author: Patricia Briggs
Publisher: Ace Hardcover
Publication date: March 8, 2016
Length: 352 pages
Genre: Urban fantasy
Source: Purchased

25Jul2012

Book Review: Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Book Review: Talulla Rising by Glen Duncan

I can’t talk about Talulla Rising without talking about its predecessor, The Last Werewolf and what happened in it, especially some major twists toward the end. So consider this your obligatory spoiler alert. SPOILERS AHEAD! Caveat lector — let the reader beware.

Now that that’s out of the way…

The Last Werewolf was one of my favorite books of 2011. Simply put, I was blown away by the language as well as the plot. Glen Duncan’s writing is extraordinary, and the voice he created for lead character Jake Marlowe was remarkable. In a nutshell, The Last Werewolf is a first-person narrative told from the perspective of the titular character Jake, who is, in fact, the very last werewolf in existence. After a lifespan of 200 years, WOCOP (the World Organisation for the Control of Occult Phenomena) has finally succeeded in wiping out the rest of his species and has let it be known that Jake is next. Jake is world-weary, bone-weary, and overall rather sick of it all, so he decides to let WOCOP hunt him down and put an end to it, once and for all.

AND THEN… (and this is where the serious spoilers arise, so — last chance — avert your eyes now!)… Jake meets Talulla, and discovers that he’s not the last after all. Talulla is a recently turned werewolf, who quickly becomes his lover, his soulmate, and his partner in monstrosity. The pair go on the road, a lupine Bonnie and Clyde, but their joy in finding true love is not fated to last. Suffice it to say, The Last Werewolf does not end with a happily-ever-after.

Talulla Rising opens several months after the conclusion of The Last Werewolf. Jake is gone, and Talulla is alone in the world, pregnant, and full of despair. Her pain over the loss of Jake is intense; her fears of impending motherhood are enormous. Can a monster be a mother? What will her child be, and how can she make sure it survives? When her newborn werewolf son, born during Talulla’s full-moon transformation, is brutally ripped from her arms by a familiar team of enemies, events are set in motion that lead to ongoing violence, desperate acts, and unlikely alliances.

Along the way, despite Talulla’s efforts to harden her heart and not let herself love, she becomes a fierce mother/protector, whose only motivation is to save her young, no matter the expense.

Talulla Rising is not for the easily disturbed. If scenes of bodily mayhem make you queasy, this will not be your cup of tea. The violence is brutal, explicit, and quite often disgusting — although, frankly, it is a team of scientists rather than any supernatural beings who carry out the worst of the atrocities committed in the course of this book.

As in the first book, Glen Duncan’s writing is magnificent. His use of words continues to astound, as he twists and turns the English language to his will. I found Talulla’s voice a little too similar to Jake’s at times, but that’s a minor complaint.

While the first book had plenty of action, it focused to a great degree on Jake’s internal dialogue. Talulla Rising is much more plot-driven, with events and disasters piling up at a tremendous clip.

When I finished The Last Werewolf, the story felt complete, and I had no idea that a sequel was planned. Likewise, after finishing Talulla Rising, I read this Q&A with Glen Duncan and was surprised to learn that this is, in fact, a trilogy, and that a third and final book is forthcoming. While some plot threads are left dangling at the end, Talulla Rising ends on a satisfying note and is complete on its own, so that it was not immediately evident to me that the author planned a follow-up. That said, I’ve truly enjoyed these two werewolf novels by Glen Duncan, and will certainly gobble up the third as soon as it’s available.