Clockwork Angel by Cassandra Clare 476 pages

This prequel to the "Mortal Instruments" series is set one hundred years earlier in Victorian London. Orphaned 16 year old Tessa Gray left America to join her older brother, Nathaniel in London. Before their reunion, she is kidnapped by the evil Dark Sisters. Vampires, warlocks, demons and Nephilim are colorful characters. The title refers to inhuman "clockwork" creatures (add this to the new "Steampunk" genre) out to destroy humans. Tessa discovers that she is no ordinary human, but is unsure what she is and who she should align herself with. She definitely wants to avoid a forced marriage to the evil Magister and fortunately she is rescued by a group of Shadowhunters. She is drawn to the volatile Will, but is determined to find and rescue Nathaniel. Only some of the questions are resolved since this is just book one in a new series: The Infernal Devices. It took me a very long time to finish this book, I loved Clare's City of Bones and did not find this quite as mesmerizing, but I just could not give up. I look forward to book 2.

In Too Deep by Jayne Ann Krentz 324 pages

"In Too Deep" provides the reader a part in another adventure with the Arcane Society and J&J Investigations. Isabella finds herself in the midst of a conspiracy that has roots going back over 20 years. She is the granddaughter of a long time conspiracy nut who has provided her a string of false identities used all of her life. Isabella was told by her grandmother that if anything happened she was to contact Fallon Jones of J&J Investigations for help and for her safety. Isabella finds herself being tracked by people with paranormal talents and has to disappear. She and Fallon are set on a course to find long lost paraphysical artifacts, the answers to old and not so old mysteries and a link to Nightshade. Nightshade is an offshoot paranormal society trying to develop a way to chemically enhance paranormal talents using the most dastardly means available. “In Too Deep” weaves a tale of mystery and suspense while allowing a romance to develop. The reader will recognize characters from past Arcane Society adventures as they provide support and vital information to help solve the case.

The Secret Servant

The Secret Servant by Daniel Silva  385 pp.

Another in the Gabriel Allon series, this time involving the kidnapping of Dr. Elizabeth Halton, daughter of the American Ambassador to the Court of St. James, by Egyptian terrorists. Allon is sent to Amsterdam to purge the files of a murdered terror analyst. In the process he uncovers a plot involving an Egyptian terrorist group called The Sword of Allah. Synchronized bombings take place at various European locales. Allon is just seconds too late to stop the kidnapping but manages to kill or seriously wound some of the terrorists. The combined forces of the Israelis, Americans, and British and a former member of the terrorist cell join in the desperate search to save the woman.The final result leaves Allon questioning his trade and may leave him dead.

Silva is a master storyteller and researches his subjects in great detail. Even though it is fiction, many details about the Mubarek regime in Egypt and the instability there are based on fact. I have to admit, it made me very nervous about the current situation there.

The Inner Circle by Brad Meltzer 449 pages

The Inner Circle begins with an old high school crush contacting Beecher White who is an archivist at the National Archives. Clementine is trying to find the father she never knew. She only knows that he was in the Army and all U. S. Government records are filed somewhere in the National Archives. The first meeting of Beecher and Clementine finds them embroiled in the death of one of Beecher's friends and co-workers. They also find themselves in the middle of secrets being passed between the President of the United States and a secret spy organization that has served the Presidency since George Washington formed the spy network. Mix in a second secret spy network, Clementine's father who has been institutionalized since he attempted to kill a president and succeeded in killing that president’s first lady. All participants work at the same time to confuse and to enlist Beecher into each side’s agenda which causes danger, death and distrust. As with all of Meltzer’s books there is no direct path to the answer. The book is riddled with little known historical facts and some twisting of well known historical events. The end of the book answers many questions but leads the reader to believe that there is more to the story that will be told in a future release.

The Children's Book / A.S. Byatt 675 p.

Definitely not a novel which lends itself to pithy summaries, The Children's Book tells the stories of many loosely interlocked characters in late Victorian and Edwardian England. The pivot family in this saga-like work are the Wellwoods: comfortable, educated, artistic, liberal residents of Todefright, a charming pastoral compound which is superficially delightful. Olive, the matriarch, writes fairy tales full of enchantment which largely pay the family's bills. And in Todefright, as in most fairy tales, there are dark nasty crawling things under the rocks of even the prettiest woods.

A.S. Byatt commands a staggering amount of knowledge of, well, many things, a lot of which she shares with the reader. They include, in no particular order, Fabians, suffragists, anarchists, pottery, puppetry, the eccentricities of Kaiser Wilhelm, labour unrest in the early 20th century, German myth, the causes of the 1st World War, et al. Most prominently, the reader learns that ideas of free love in an era before birth control were a real disaster. Like you wouldn't believe.

I don't want to sound sarcastic here. Byatt has so much to say about women of the era which resonates deeply today, in particular the tension between work and family. Her erudition is almost terrifying. And I loved her earlier works Possession and Angels & Insects. As a narrative, though, this just didn't work for me. It felt out of focus, as we move from character to character with, often, poor or non-existent transitions. There is far too much (for me) exposition on the above-mentioned topics with too little 'meat' holding the plot together. To the very end, it's hardly clear who Byatt regards as her central characters in a cast of many.

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour/ Bryan Lee O'Malley

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 6: Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour by Bryan Lee O'Malley. graphic literature, comic violence, relationships, adventure? 248 pages

Well...I can chalk "finish a graphic novel series" off of my bucket list now, because I just completed Bryan Lee O'Malley's final Scott Pilgrim adventure- Scott Pilgrim's Finest Hour. I'm gonna go right ahead and say that even though this is a review of the final book, it's hard for me not to reflect on the series as a whole...and honestly, my opinion differs between the two.

Let's start with the plot. After the extremely depressing events of the 5th book, we find Scott freeloading off of his parents and living a sedentary lifestyle filled with video games and snacks. I kind of wanted O'Malley to go all 80's action film and have Scott training silently in a Buddhist temple on a mountain somewhere until he gets called in for one last battle, but that's just me. Needless to say, it is up to Scott's brilliant supporting cast (who have, as a whole been absolutely hilarious for the whole series) to get him out of his funk and back in the mental state to take down evil ex #7, the big kahuna himself, Gideon Graves (you can tell that O'Malley draws a lot of his inspiration for Graves from Jason Schwarzmann's portrayal of him in the movie). Without revealing too much else, this book does feature a lot of full page action sequences that look great and provide for interesting battles, but stray a little bit from the awesome narrative style and dialogue that made the last few books so great.

It's hard to explain my beef with the ending without revealing anything important, but let me just say that my biggest problem with the ending was that a lot of stuff was happening too fast and without proper buildup. You didn't have time to catch your breath and actually experience what was going on because by the time you wrapped your mind around some aspect of the epic-scale final battle, something new and completely different was already going on. I understand that it is always hard to end a series and leave every fan happy, because different fans want to see how different things fold out, but I found that the emotional ending that O'Malley seemed flat to me and I would have liked a little more going on after the final battle.

All opinions of the final book aside, I have definitely enjoyed reading Scott Pilgrim. It seems strange that less than two weeks ago, I hadn't even picked one of these books up. O'Malley really does draw you in to a world that seems both familiar and totally out-of-this-world at the same time. I have learned not to judge a book by its cover (or genre as the case may be) and I think that Scott Pilgrim was an excellent gateway into the world of graphic literature. A whole new broad range of adventures have become open to me and I plan on enjoying each and everyone of them in time.

I remember nothing

I remember nothing by Nora Ephron 137 pg.

I don't want to get into an argument with Nora about who remembers less but I remembered this book enough to enjoy it all the way to the end. I read with some relief that a large inheritance almost prevented us from experiencing When Harry Met Sally...thank goodness for her (relatively) poor relatives! I also enjoyed the food related stories and the rule about butter. - Christa

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The Night Bookmobile

The Night Bookmobile by Audrey Niffenegger 40 pp.

I really enjoyed this brief but thought-provoking graphic novel. It made me hope for an afterlife in a library of books I haven't read yet.

Oh No She Didn't!/Clinton Kelly

Oh No She Didn't!: The Top 100 Style Mistakes Women Make and How to Avoid Them by Clinton Kelly; fashion; 208 pages

I admit that What Not To Wear is one of my guilty pleasures. Fortunately, I don't have cable, so my exposure is limited to when I'm traveling or at a friend's house, which keeps me from getting too engrossed. So this book, by one of the show's hosts, was was fun diversion for me, even if I'm not sure I'll take it all to heart.

Kelly doesn't pull any punches here, with brutally honest takes on every fashion faux pas imaginable. But I'll admit, the snark is most of what I loved about this book (that, and the photos illustrating extreme cases of each slip-up). While I think everyone will recognize themselves in a few of these entries, overall, it's a good book of advice on looking good. The main point Kelly wants to make seems to be that everything should fit right, and if it doesn't fit off the rack, pay a few extra dollars to have it altered. Sound advice, if not always realistic (for me, at least). A fun, fast read that should be shared.

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Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe/Bryan Lee O'Malley

Scott Pilgrim Vol. 5: Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe by Bryan Lee O'Malley. graphic literature, comic violence, relationships, music. 184 pages

After watching last night's Super Bowl festivities and witnessing the Lombardi Trophy return to its original home in Green Bay, I thought that nothing could possibly bring me down. Unfortunately, I had yet to read the 5th volume of Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim series. To call the story a downer would be a real understatement. I am sort of at an advantage to all of the Scott Pilgrim faithful who read the books when they were first released, because unlike they were when Vol. 5 was first released, I know that there is a 6th and final Scott Pilgrim book where everything turns out alright. Unfortunately, this reassurance doesn't soften the blow very much.

After the events of Vol. 4 when Scott gets it together, Vol. 5 does a complete 180 and the reader is treated to watching the life to which Scott (and the readers) have become accustomed to COMPLETELY FALL APART. In a quick 184 pages, Scott manages to not only lose his home, his girlfriend, his band, and his dignity, but also his will to keep going. The optimistic Scott Pilgrim of the past four volumes is replaced with a hollow shell of a character that is driven only by his obsession over why his girlfriend has left him even after he has taken down 6 of Ramona's evil exes (if you've been keeping count but haven't read the books, Scott's adversaries this time are the tag-team duo of evil exes 5 and 6, twins Kyle and Ken Katyanagi and their limitless arsenal of robots). I understand that in order for Scott to truly complete his epic journey, he has to fall and then get back up again, but this fall was painful to watch. I hate to say this (because it makes me sound like a crazy person) but I feel really bad for him after reading this. This isn't meant as a criticism of O'Malley's story. On the contrary, in fact, I would like to compliment him for creating a character for which I can have true sympathy (something I don't even have for REAL people sometimes). My only regret in reading this story is that I didn't have the 6th volume ready and waiting so I could recover from this universe-sized buzzkill.