#FridayReads Currently Reading: Allegiant by Veronica Roth (Spoiler Free)

I finished The Lost Sun earlier this week, and I'm about 80% done with Fangirl. I'll probably have Fangirl finished tomorrow. In the meantime, Veronica Roth's third book in the Divergent Series came out on Tuesday the 22nd, and I could not resist the temptation to download the Allegiant e-book to my Nook.

Divergent review here
Insurgent review here

The Goodreads synopsis reads as follows:

What if your whole world was a lie?
What if a single revelation—like a single choice—changed everything?
What if love and loyalty made you do things you never expected?

The faction-based society that Tris Prior once believed in is shattered—fractured by violence and power struggles and scarred by loss and betrayal. So when offered a chance to explore the world past the limits she’s known, Tris is ready. Perhaps beyond the fence, she and Tobias will find a simple new life together, free from complicated lies, tangled loyalties, and painful memories.

But Tris’s new reality is even more alarming than the one she left behind. Old discoveries are quickly rendered meaningless. Explosive new truths change the hearts of those she loves. And once again, Tris must battle to comprehend the complexities of human nature—and of herself—while facing impossible choices about courage, allegiance, sacrifice, and love.

The explosive conclusion to Veronica Roth's #1 New York Times bestselling Divergent trilogy reveals the secrets of the dystopian world that has captivated millions of readers in Divergent and Insurgent.

I'm only halfway done reading Allegiant at this point, and I do not wish to read any spoilers nor to give anyone else any major spoilers. I think I can safely say these things about the first half:

- I honestly need someone to pay me to do nothing but read novels all day, everyday, because finishing Allegiant is all I really want to do.

- At the exact same time, I don't want this series to end. I'm nervous and excited for the end at the same time. This is like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows all over again. I anticipate tears. Hopefully not as many tears as when I read the ending of the His Dark Materials trilogy (if you'd seen me, you honestly would have thought someone died in real life).

- I take back every good thing I ever thought about Caleb when I read Divergent.

- Christina. Even though I never really pictured her as a light-skinned woman as I was reading, I cannot wait to see Zoe Kravitz playing her on film. I love Christina and I love Zoe Kravitz. That's all I'm saying for now.

- Tori Wu. Oh my goddess, Tori.

- This is a minor spoiler, but I'll go ahead and say it: Tris doubts whether her mother and father ever truly loved each other, but finds evidence they were really in love. This makes me so happy. And I really think I'm going to love Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn playing Natalie and Andrew in the movie.

Natalie turns out to be an even bigger badass than Tris even thought in Insurgent. That has Ashley Judd written all over it.

If you read it, tell me what you think - but only if you can do it without spoilers. I still haven't forgiven Pinterest for spoiling that one particular character death in Mockingjay for me.

#YA #BookReview The Lost Sun by Tessa Gratton #NorseMyth

The ending is sad (but since this is only the first book in the series, I'm not TOO worried about that), but otherwise, this book is kind of perfect. By that I mean Tessa Gratton - a scholar of Old English who previously translated 'Beowulf' - does a really wonderful job of weaving Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon saga tradition into a young adult novel set in the contemporary world, tweaked with Germanic folkways. And - oh, yeah - the Norse gods are real.

The plot draws heavily on the Norse myth of the death of Baldur, traditionally the most beloved son of Odin. Yet Baldur is a secondary character to Soren Bearskin (that's Bears' Kin rather than Bear Skin), the mortal son of Berserker who went TOO berserk, filled with his own dawning battle-rage and destined to be like his father, yet not like him.

Soren is just beginning to realize how deeply he loves his friend Astrid, the daughter of a famous fortune-teller and a fortune-teller herself, when Baldur fails to make his annual return from the land of death. Baldur, who represents the sun, is sort of like a phoenix, who dies and then rises from his own ashes - at least, he has until now. Soren and Astrid set off on an adventure, guided by fate and joined by a new friend, the strange Loki's Kin girl named Vider. There are trolls, but just little ones. Their goal is to find the apple orchard of Idun, the keeper of youth and immortality, and when they get there, nothing is as it seems.



One of the really brilliant things about this book is the nature of reality in it: the gods are real and interact with mortals (Vider, it turns out, knows Loki personally, and Soren meets Loki's daughter Fenris Wolf), but are also spoken of in myths, and there are different versions. The gods could tell mortals their own true histories, but they choose to let the mortals create their own versions, because even the gods have agendas, and it wouldn't suit their ends to have their full stories known. The gods are mysterious, and even Astrid's foresight can't reveal everything about the journey she and Soren will make...

Resulting in a sad ending. I hope the next book in the series makes right what was "wrong" with the ending. I also hope Loki gets to play a bigger role in the next book. When he appears, it's as a sullen teenage boy. The myths about him make him the mother of Fenris (he became a female wolf and lived among a pack of wild wolves; all were slaughtered except Loki, and he then discovered his belly swollen with Fenris), but she calls him "Father." I would like Tessa Gratton to tell me more about Loki.

Gratton's conception of Freya is very interesting as well. Most of what I've read associated the queen of the Valkyries with the All-Mother Frigg. I've never read anything else that associated Freya with Hel, the queen of the world of the dead. Hel is usually called Loki's daughter, along with Fenris and the Midgard Serpent (Loki's three children with his frost giant mistress). I like this twist, making the goddess of love and war Freya one with the death-goddess.



The Goddess who embraces the souls of warriors at death should be the one who watches over their shades - which is part of the traditional mythology, that dead warriors feast with Freya and become her lovers. Hel is usually thought of more of ruling over the souls of dead mortals, I think, but I think this is a really interesting twist. Maybe Freya, Frigg, and Hel are the trinity or triple goddess in Norse mythology, equivalent to Persephone-Demeter-Hecate in Greek mythology and the triple goddess The Morrigan in Irish mythology?

If I lived in this universe, which god would I choose to follow? I'd probably belong to Freya, like Astrid does. Either Freya or Frigg, although the temptation to belong to Loki would be there as well.

It's really different from any other YA novel I've read before. It's fascinating. So other than wanting more, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I look forward to the next one, The Strange Maid. It won't be out until June 10, 2014, but you can preorder it now.

I got this book free in exchange for a review through Amazon Vine. I was not otherwise compensated for this review, which represents my own honest opinion.

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#FridaysReads 'Fangirl' and 'The Lost Sun'

I'm currently reading Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl and loving it! The synopsis from Goodreads:

"From the author of the New York Times bestseller Eleanor and Park.

"A coming-of-age tale of fan fiction, family and first love. 

"Cath is a Simon Snow fan.

"Okay, the whole world is a Simon Snow fan . . .

"But for Cath, being a fan is her life — and she’s really good at it. She and her twin sister, Wren, ensconced themselves in the Simon Snow series when they were just kids; it’s what got them through their mother leaving.

"Reading. Rereading. Hanging out in Simon Snow forums, writing Simon Snow fan fiction, dressing up like the characters for every movie premiere.

"Cath’s sister has mostly grown away from fandom, but Cath can’t let go. She doesn’t want to.

"Now that they’re going to college, Wren has told Cath she doesn’t want to be roommates. Cath is on her own, completely outside of her comfort zone. She’s got a surly roommate with a charming, always-around boyfriend, a fiction-writing professor who thinks fan fiction is the end of the civilized world, a handsome classmate who only wants to talk about words . . . And she can’t stop worrying about her dad, who’s loving and fragile and has never really been alone.

"For Cath, the question is: Can she do this?

"Can she make it without Wren holding her hand? Is she ready to start living her own life? Writing her own stories?

"And does she even want to move on if it means leaving Simon Snow behind?"

Simon Snow, for those who don't know, is a fictionalized version of Harry Potter. (A fictionalized version of a fictional character? It's kind of meta, but that's what it is.) Cath and Wren are well-know in the Simon Snow fandom as the co-writers of an ongoing romance series between Simon and his roommate Baz. Baz is, essentially, Draco Malfoy. Essentially, Cath ships Drarry - really, really hard. If you've ever been in a fandom and you're familiar with fanfics and shipping, you'll probably find this book highly amusing. 

If you find it highly amusing that there are people who get into fandoms and know terms like fanfics and shipping, you'll probably find this book highly amusing. 

Cath and Wren are from Omaha, Nebraska. 

I'm also about 100 pages into The Lost Sun by Tessa Gratton. Its Goodreads synopsis:

"Fans of Neil Gaiman's American Gods and Holly Black's The Curse Workers will embrace this richly drawn, Norse-mythology-infused alternate world: the United States of Asgard. Seventeen-year-old Soren Bearskin is trying to escape the past. His father, a famed warrior, lost himself to the battle-frenzy and killed thirteen innocent people. Soren cannot deny that berserking is in his blood--the fevers, insomnia, and occasional feelings of uncontrollable rage haunt him. So he tries to remain calm and detached from everyone at Sanctus Sigurd's Academy. But that's hard to do when a popular, beautiful girl like Astrid Glyn tells Soren she dreams of him. That's not all Astrid dreams of--the daughter of a renowned prophetess, Astrid is coming into her own inherited abilities. 

"When Baldur, son of Odin and one of the most popular gods in the country, goes missing, Astrid sees where he is and convinces Soren to join her on a road trip that will take them to find not only a lost god, but also who they are beyond the legacy of their parents and everything they've been told they have to be."

Gratton has written this book in a fairly brilliant way. It's set in a contemporary, familiar world (the 21st century U.S.A.), using familiar modern language, yet there's just enough Norse mythology and Germanic folkways to make it resonate with the time-honored sagas of the English language and its cultural ancestors (think Beowulf). Gratton is a scholar of Old English, but this novel is in the voice of a modern teenager. 

I don't think I'm explaining it well, but it's really well done. 

Heather at Blonde, Undercover Blonde had a good idea today: to link to all the reviews she's done so far in 2013. I don't want to link to every single one, but here's one for every month:

January - The Count of Monte Cristo
February - Cora: The Unwilling Queen
March - The Art of Disappearing
April - Hemingway's Girl
May - Lover At Last
June - In the Body of the World
July - Divergent
August - Insurgent
September - Finding Esta
October - Princesses Behaving Badly

Book Club Friday: Princesses Behaving Badly

Happy Friday! This week went really fast (time flies when you're learning how to work your husband's hemodialysis machine), and now it's time for Book Club Friday once again.

Princesses Behaving Badly: Real Stories from History Without the Fairy-Tale Endings by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Disney princesses, these women are not. But if you've ever wanted to know what a princess's life is REALLY like, without the singing crustaceans, this may be the book for you.

Does anyone else remember Uppity Women of Medieval Times and some of the other titles that Vicki León and some others* used to write for Conari Press (now part of Red Wheel/Weiser)? There was a whole series in the 1990s that sought to fight the erasure of herstory by bringing to light some of the lesser-known, but fascinating, women in history. This book is like a mini-course in that.

Like the Uppity Women series (its foremother), this book divides the women into categories, such as Warriors, Partiers, and Madwomen, rather than proceeding in strict chronological order. It focuses mainly on European history - the Germano-British House of Hanover seems to be a favorite subject - but is just multicultural enough to pass the sniff test.

Some of the women you'll find between the pages include:

- Pingyang (7th century China)
- Boudicca (1st century Britain)
- Durgavati (16th century India)
- Hatshepsut (ca. 1500 BCE Egypt)
- Njinga of Ndongo (17th century West Africa - what is now Angola)
- Roxolana (16th century Ottoman Empire)
- La Malinche (16th century Mexico)
- Sarah Winnemucca (Paiute people, 1844-1891)
- Margaret Windsor (1930-2002, sister of Elizabeth II of England)

The writing style is very informal, which some reviewers have disliked (one compared it to the tone of a gossip magazine), and I have to say, I see their point. I think what bothered me the most was that some of the passages about allegedly promiscuous princesses took on what I felt was too judgmental a tone. (To be fair, Napoleon and some of the Hanover kings get a little slut-shamed, too, so it isn't a particularly gender-biased strain of judgment.)

If you can forgive a narrative whose voice can, at times, be a bit intrusive, and you're a young person considering a history or women's studies major, or you're fascinated with history as a hobby, or you're a not-necessarily-younger person who's fascinated with royalty in general or who wants to brush up on some of the lesser-known women in political history, I recommend this book to you as a good jumping-on point. If you find a favorite, I'm sure you'll go on to research her in more depth.

Another complaint I noticed in briefly skimming over some previous reviews was that not all the women in the book are, strictly speaking, princesses. Some of them are impostors, or from cultures without a formalized system of royal titles, and some of them (especially in the early chapters) are legendary figures who may not have basis in historical fact. This part didn't particularly bother me; if Rodriguez McRobbie had stuck to a very formal definition of princesshood, the book would almost certainly have been more Eurocentric and less interesting.

I'm fairly happy with her selections, and with the depth of information she got into with most of them. I do think we need (frequent) reminders that history was never a male-only affair, so I appreciate the efforts of books such as these. I would buy it for my nieces, but I'd also try to get them to retain it as just one part of a larger women's history bookshelf.



I received an advance reading copy of this book through the Amazon Vine Program at no charge in exchange for this review. I was not otherwise compensated for this review, which is my own honest opinion.

View all my reviews on Goodreads

Next Amazon Vine picks to read by next month:

*Including Autumn Stephens, whose latest book is Feisty First Ladies, available from Cleis Press. I saw it in the Viva Editions catalog when Cleis Press sent me a copy of Mitzi Szereto's The Wilde Passions of Dorian Gray. - Note noted on November 5, 2013.