This is one I’ve heard about a lot, though apart from the basic premise I had somehow manage to get to it without major spoilers. Result! The premise: each year, a boy and a girl from each District are selected by lot to fight to the death in the arena, for the entertainment viewing of the masses. Of twenty four children, only the winner is allowed to live.

Katniss is an extraordinary heroine. At sixteen, she lives in great poverty and is the protector and food-gatherer for her family. When her beloved little sister Prim is called up to the Hunger Games, Katniss does not hesitate to take her place. Joining her is Peeta, the son of the local baker, a boy who once showed kindness to Katniss when she was starving. The two of them go through the pre-preparations in the Capitol, all the while knowing that they will soon have to fight not only the other contestants, but also each other.

If she is going to survive, Katniss has to be ruthless, she has to be smart, and she has to be very careful who she trusts.

The tagline on this edition of the book is ’strategy is everything,’ and it’s this that really lifts the book into being a truly great story. Step by step, we follow Katniss into darkness, through thirst and starvation and the quite brutal reality of what she has to do. The combination of reality television with gladiatorial/deadly combat is hardly a new concept in science fiction – indeed, it was around long before reality television itself was established – and yet this feels fresh and authentic, with a cast of characters who are drawn vividly even when they only make brief appearances in the narrative.

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When I first saw this book described by the author as being the book Jane Austen might have written had she lived in a world with magic, I did think that was a bit much. Obviously I wanted to *read* such a book, but really, comparing yourself to Austen? Isn’t that reaching a tad high, especially for a debut novelist? Also, let’s face it, a lot of authors have jumped on the Austen bandwagon. I’ve been burned by a lot of bad sequels to Pride and Prejudice, and while I never actually got around to trying that novel with added zombies, I did read a page of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, and I’m never getting that thirty seconds of my life back!

But then I read this book, and I realised what was going on here.

Shades of Milk and Honey is a novel so immersed in Austen and what for the purposes of this review I shall call Austenalia, that it seems impossible to read it any other way. It verges on parody, though the clever use of language and extreme authenticity of characters keeps it on the right side of that line. Which is not to say that there is not a hint of mockery about Austenian conventions in this book – but it’s the gentle kind of mockery that comes from someone who genuinely loves that author’s work, as opposed to, for example, the clumsy and appallingly offensive Red Dwarf episode written by Robert Llewellyn who had obviously never even watched a costume drama all the way through to the end…

Where was I?

I can’t speak to the reading experience of Shades of Milk and Honey if you are not familiar with Austen – I think it would still be a very enjoyable story, a pleasing combination of magic and historical romance with strong family relationships and much social detail. It fits very nicely into the current fashion for women’s historical fantasy, and while it differs a great deal from Alaya Johnson’s Moonshine and Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series, I can see it sharing their reading audiences. There is a potential here for mass reading appeal among the non-spec-fic community, as with The Time Traveller’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger, the Naomi Novik novels about Temeraire, or the admittedly-not-genre The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler, and the book seems packaged to make the most of that potential readership. I hope it finds it!

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Day 30 – What book are you reading right now?

I was looking forward to this question all along, because it was so far in the future, and how can you know what you’re going to read in a month’s time? There was always the possibility that I would completely cheat and fix the question, but I hoped I wouldn’t.

And I woke up this morning and realised I couldn’t answer the question at all, because I finished reading Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente on the iPad last night, and I wasn’t reading a book at all. Horrors!

Luckily, despite a chaotic day of editing, rain, Worldcon stress, the internet getting all in my face, and general childrenness, I managed to rectify the situation by lunchtime. I was very stern with myself, deciding I had to pick up the book on my current to read pile (um yes I now have a prime pile separate from my two tier shelf, don’t judge me) that I was most excited about reading RIGHT THIS SECOND, in order to be completely honest and not just pick something I thought made me sound smart or serious or cool or awesome.

So I would like to announce that I am now reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, which is as promised EXACTLY like reading a Jane Austen book with magic in it. It even has oldey timey rough-ripped page edges, and uses the word ’shew!’ I love it already.

And with that, we come to the end of the book meme. Well, that was fun! It was kind of nice to take a break from talking about myself and explore some of my history of reading. Back to normal tomorrow, I guess, coming up with my OWN topics to blog about…

See you there.

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Day 29 – Saddest character death OR best/most satisfying character death (or both!)

Ha, this one is surprisingly easy, and for once I don’t feel the need to give a million different answers to a simple question.

To my mind, one of the absolute worst literary deaths of all time was Sirius Black, in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

[spoilers for all but the last Harry Potter book in the post below, on the grounds that some of you are following the films rather than the books and don't know yet which Weasley twin is doomed]

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Day 28 – First favorite book or series obsession

I’m going to take a leaf out of Alex’s book and instead of talking about my childhood series obsessions (mostly in various shades of Enid Blyton) I’ll talk about the first fantasy series I really obsessed about as a teen. Not Eddings, though he was certainly my gateway drug.

Jennifer Roberson. Chronicles of the Cheysuli.

Looking back on those books now, they are one hot mess of problematic gender relationships. Every female protagonist ends up raped, and most of the male characters I initially liked turned out to be rapists. Which kind of sucks. It’s a little disturbing how little that meant to me as a fourteen year old discovering fantasy fiction – I didn’t *enjoy* reading about women being raped, but it was something so common in the fiction I was reading, that much like the grotesque violence in David Eddings books, it was something I shrugged off.

Wow, teenagers are kind of sociopathic creatures, aren’t they?

The other thing about the books which I remember, looking back, is that the romances really frustrated me. If I had known about the existence of fanfic back then, I would have been writing my own emo stories about Finn/Alix and all the other couples I WANTED which never happened, while systematically erasing all those boring canon couples.

Wow. These books have not aged well in my memory.

So why did I love them so much? Shapechangers was I think the first fantasy novel I ever read which had a female protagonist, and I loved Alix deeply and fiercely, even if she did go off with the wrong bloke. I loved Keely as well, who I think was Alix’s great-granddaughter. The whole thing was a gorgeously textured family saga, covering many generations, with magic and politics and diplomacy all tangled up together. I loved the scope of the story, the uncomfortable relationship between the rulers of Homana and the shapechangers who began the series as outcasts and ended up, through marriage and strategic policies, as the rulers themselves. I loved the epic, tangled family tree and how the “heroes” and “villains” were ultimately united through love and children.

And, of course, I fell in love with the characters. Doesn’t it always come down to that?

The funny thing is, while I also followed Roberson’s other series, about the Sword Dancers, which was far more feminist, had a far more innovative and unusual fantasy setting and had a fabulous romance at the heart of it, I never loved it quite as much. Teenagers. Also with the rubbish taste!

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This is a book I should have read fifteen years ago. This is a book someone should have put in my hands the week before I started university, and locked me in a room until I had read it. I should have read it again before I started my Honours degree, and every year I worked on my PhD. When I walked out of my head of school’s office, numbed by his awful pronouncement that the work I had done over 5 years was not enough, that the thesis was simply not worthy of a doctorate because of its scope and subject matter, I should have gone home again and read this book from cover to cover before I began my campaign to prove him wrong.

(he was, as it turned out, wrong, but that is a story for another day)

I don’t believe in ’should’ when it comes to books. Who are you to decide how I should spend my limited reading time? But yeah. Someone should have told me about this book.

(except, of course, they did)

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Day 27 – If a book contains ______, you will always read it (and a book or books that contain it)!

Romans. Especially sexy Romans. What am I talking about, all Romans are sexy!

I don’t know if there’s much that will make me always read a book, because I am way pickier than that, but some of my literary sweet spots include: things set in Italy, fairy tale rewrites, Greek myth, lady knights, superheroines, fencing, the 1920’s, theatre backstage, and fantasy with frocks. Anything featuring one or more of those things will certainly earn me a second or third serious look.

So what are your literary sweet spots?

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October “Toby” Daye is living a lie. She may be a Changeling and Faery Knight, but she also has a human partner and child who don’t even know what she looks like beneath her glamour. One fateful night, while hunting for her liege lord’s missing family, she is captured and bespelled – and loses fourteen years.

When you’re the mother of a two-year-old, it’s tough to lose fourteen years.

This is probably one of the best combinations of faerie lore and detective noir fiction I’ve read in some time. The worldbuilding and the shifting between one world and another were done very cleverly, and I liked the way that the faeries had integrated into modern culture, so that all manner of parks, buildings and restaurants throughout the city were Official Territory. I also liked the fact that romance wasn’t a priority as it so often is in this kind of urban fantasy. Toby has her share of romantic and sexual baggage, but there was no obvious Mr Right (or even Mr Right Now) flagged in this first volume, which gave us plenty of time to focus on the more interesting relationships.

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Day 26 – OMG WTF? OR most irritating/awful/annoying book ending

The first one that first comes to mind is the Mill on the Floss because WTF, drowning, seriously? Following my Lydia Bennet argument though, this one doesn’t count for much because it’s a book I don’t love anyway. Finding an ending I hate in a book I love would be a better answer, I think!

The next reading experience that leaps into my head is Bold as Love by Gwyneth Jones, a book I loved beyond reason. I still remember the sickening feeling of ‘oh oh, only a few pages to go, how can she possibly… oh. WTF???’ It’s the one time I have been tempted to throw a book across a room, so great was my frustration at those three little words, To Be Continued. That’s not the author’s fault though, it’s the publisher. The very idea of publishing the first novel of a SERIAL series without marking it as such makes my blood boil. We need to know if there’s gonna be closure!

Likewise, the ending of Connie Willis’ Blackout is beyond frustrating, thanks to a publishing choice. We get half the book and then sorry, wait nine months for the next volume. SO MEAN. It’s particularly harmful to the reading experience because we had just got past the interesting but not fast-moving set up half of the story and were totally ready to have our brains blown out by whatever Willis had for us next. To be continued. Gah.

I really want to not count that too, and to come up with a brilliant example of a book I otherwise loved but had a stupid ending, and I can’t think of… oh. OH.

Okay, it’s not a book I otherwise loved. It’s a thoroughly unlovable book apart from a few fangirl scenes. But. It’s a book with an ending so bad, so utterly awful, that it colours the entire series that came before it. A book that gives with one hand and rips away marvellous childhood memories with the other, generations before George Lucas came blundering into his own creation with a pickaxe and a host of good intentions.

It’s an ending that spoils everything, and leaves the reader bludgeoned around the head with a little bit of sick in their mouths.

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Day 25 – Any five books from your “to be read” stack

Like Random Alex, I have some very old books in my TBR pile. Cough. On my TBR shelves. For a while there I added a coloured sticky note to books that had been there a year, with a different colour each year, to show how long it had been there, but that just got really depressing, so I stopped. I’ve had a few clear outs of the shelves in the last 12 months, but there are still books that have been there as long as we’ve lived in this house (five years)

A random sample from both ends of the shelf includes:

Sebastian, by Anne Bishop
The Steel Remains, by Richard Morgan
Who Fears Death, by Nnedi Okorafor
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Gossip Girl: You’re the One that I Want, by Cecily Von Ziegesar

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