Book Review: Lacey Goes to Tokyo by C.H. Lyn

Lacey Goes to Tokyo

By C.H. Lyn

I received an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

The cover is perfect for this book. You see a shapely woman from behind in a slinky red dress looking out over Tokyo, holding a very hefty gun behind her back. (It reminds me of the old television show, Alias, about a female CIA agent, or rather double agent.)

In this book, Lacey Devaine is a four-year veteran of a spy ring which fronts as an exclusive escort service, Miss Belle’s Travel Guides. Lacey was once a prostitute but now she works for Miss Belle, saving other women and people in general from human trafficking when possible.

The Tokyo assignment is particularly tough because the man who requested her was once one of her clients. She feels a certain obligation, though she won’t admit it, because she believes he is the one who called Miss Belle and got her out of her deadly situation. It’s also a very important assignment as the powerful men she is pitted against hold the fate of a whole village in their hands.

Because it is such a difficult story to tell, the author was careful not to go over the edge. C.H. Lyn said in an interview that because there are women getting paid for sex, there are no sex scenes. There is no direct abuse shown, but there are the aftereffects that the women have to deal with. In a lot of ways, it’s a sad story, but it’s hopeful too because the oppressed are given power to take control of the situation.

The story goes back and forth between Lacey and Miss Belle as they deal with the situations they are in. it’s so hard to write a review for an action based story like this because I don’t want to give too much away.

I was very impressed with the cultural and setting details in Tokyo. I was equally impressed with the relationships and characters that were built. I felt immersed in a story about real people. The action scenes are tightly plotted with good tension and great details as well.

Bravo! Definitely a 5 star book.

Sapphire Flames by Ilona Andrews

I first discovered books by Ilona Andrews a few years ago in my library’s digital catalog. I started with the Innkeeper series and thoroughly enjoyed that so I moved on to the Hidden Legacy series. The latest book is Sapphire Flames and it was a fast-paced, read with strong romance and paranormal elements.

Ilona Andrews is actually a pen name for a husband and wife team. From their website –

‘“Ilona Andrews” is the pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing team. Ilona is a native-born Russian and Gordon is a former communications sergeant in the U.S. Army. Contrary to popular belief, Gordon was never an intelligence officer with a license to kill, and Ilona was never the mysterious Russian spy who seduced him. They met in college, in English Composition 101, where Ilona got a better grade. (Gordon is still sore about that.)’

They bring that great sense of humor to their stories as well.

The Hidden Legacy books take place in a version of our world where families with magic skills are recognized as “Houses.” House warfare can be pretty violent.

When the series starts, the Baylor family is living a simple life as private investigators, hiding their abilities lest they become a target for other Houses. By Sapphire Flames, they have gained recognition as a House and are fully involved in the intrigue of House politics. Every member of the family is a unique and interesting character with their own special magical talents.

Catalina is now the head of the House Baylor and a Prime in her own right, which means her magic is extremely powerful, but she’s always been afraid of using that power.

The story begins when the Head of House Montgomery, Augustine, comes to the Baylors in the middle of the night for help because a teen boy, from another magic family, is standing on the roof of a hospital threatening to jump. They know Catalina can stop him. She tries to demur, afraid she could make matters worse.

Augustine’s composure cracked, and a human being looked back at me through his eyes. “He’s just a child Catalina. He already lost so much. He’s in the worst pain of his short life and he has no idea how to contain it. He just wants to stop hurting. Please try.”

How could anyone say no? She agrees and is drawn into a convoluted intrigue that involves a vast conspiracy and great dangers to her family and the city.

To complicate matters, enter Alessandro. In order to be recognized as a House, members of the family had to be tested by other magic users. The man Catalina was pitted against is Alessandro. She became a little bit obsessed with him and stalked his Instagram, until he followed her back. Now, he’s in town and involved in the whole sordid mess.

I highly recommend starting at the beginning of the series. You could read them out of order and enjoy them, but you’ll enjoy them a lot MORE if you start at the beginning. They are fast reads and if you like one, you will want more.

Book Review: The Daughters of Temperance Hobbes by Katherine Howe

This is the sequel to The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane. I would put it at magical realism rather than fantasy per se.

Connie is up for tenure and her workload is ridiculous, which has already put a strain on her relationship with her live in boyfriend. It’s about to get a whole lot worse. There’s a curse at work and the man Connie loves is in danger. She’ll have to work a spell to save him, but she’s not the only one who has ever worked this spell in an attempt to save the man she loved.

The scenes switch between present day university politics, the frantic attempt to put together the antiquated recipe ingredients for the spell, some of which are very bizarre, and the scenes of yesteryear as an ancestor attempts the same spell.

I really enjoyed the look at academic world politics where people are trying to get their degree and others are making choices based on whether they have tenure or not.

The politics are well described, as is the setting. “The Green Monster had once been a grand Cantabridgian house of the Gilded Age, all dentil moldings and curving oak-railed staircases and marble fireplaces.”

Overall, an engrossing and fun read for the history, the relationships, and the witchcraft. 

Review of Wanderers: A Novel by Chuck Wendig

Wanderers: A Novel

by Chuck Wendig

It’s been a few months since I read this book so the question is – what stuck with me? It was an interesting read, clearly inspired by the concerns of our current day.

In Wanderers, the environment is going downhill fast and there is a fair certainty that eventually it’s going to hit a wall and people are going to die. It’s a fair bet that the next big epidemic is going to take out a fair number of people. But where will it start and how will it proceed?

It begins with the sleepwalkers. One day someone just starts walking. One by one, others join them. If someone tries to detain them, they explode. They seem to be bullet proof, or very nearly so. They are accompanied by family members and friends who try to care for them without impeding their progress. I liked how Wendig took this down to the personal level, letting us meet these people and their caregivers instead of just talking about the phenomenon. We start with one sleepwalker, her sister, and their journey.

There is a philosophical argument at work here about who deserves to be protected by the law, the people who are walking or the people who live in the areas the walkers pass through? People are reasonably worried that this is being caused by a disease that could spread. Are they suffering this or causing it? Who do we protect?

It’s definitely a dark story. Men do evil things out of fear and hate. Wendig doesn’t really flinch away from describing all the gory details.

Even our hero, Benjamin Ray, is in a state of disgrace as the story begins. He is a former scientist with the CDC. In a moment of clarity or fear, he saw the horrible practices on a factory farm and was sure that it would cause a “zoonotic leap” where the disease leaps from animal to human. He manufactures evidence to shut them down. Like the boy who cried wolf, it backfires and he ends up losing his job.

“Some moments he felt like, I did the right thing, and they punished me for it. In the next moment, the opposite came to him with grave certainty: You lied to suit your agenda, and you deserved worse than you got.”

At the same time, another plague has reared its ugly head. It is fast moving but it spreads before people know they have it. It roots into the brain like a fungus, giving the bearer a hideous white crust around the mouth and upper respiratory distress. The death rate is high and it causes people to act homicidal before they die. Where did it start and how do they stop it?

But the CDC now has an AI computer that anticipates plagues. It anticipated the sleepwalkers, the white mask plague, and it wants Benji on the case. Why? Will the CDC let him?

It’s an ugly story, beautifully told, brutal and pain filled. I couldn’t put it down, all 800 pages of it.

Memoir ruminations - A New Kind of Country by Dorothy Gilman

A New Kind of Country by Dorothy Gilman

I’ve always enjoyed memoirs by authors, they’re so vivid. Gilman was a particular favorite author of mine growing up. (Her mysteries feature an irrepressible widow and grandmother in her sixties who is recruited by the CIA.)

This is one of those small memoirs of fascinating thoughts and observations. The book begins well after Gilman’s divorce as her second son goes off to college. She decides to move from Suburban New York to the coast of Nova Scotia.

For someone who went from her parent’s home to living with a husband then having two children, the solitude is quite different. At the same time, there is more of a sense of community in the little village than she is used to.

One night she goes to bed at 10 instead of her customary 11, turning out the lights, and her neighbor calls, concerned she might be ill. “Was she alright? Did she need anything?”

 “…there are some pleasing aspects to this after years spent in cities where one could die in June and nobody notice until Christmas.”

It was fascinating to me to read of her experiencing being alone and the things she did living in the country for the first time in her forties, much as I had experienced them on my own in my twenties, before I was married and had a child.

The life of a lobstering village is fascinating, and sad as well. It’s a fruitful and rewarding but dangerous life, as has always been for men making their living on the sea.

She describes the boats going out en masse on the first day of lobster season, and the comings and goings thereafter, along with her first humorous foray to the docks to buy some lobster for herself.

“One felt that if the economy of the entire world collapsed it would make no palpable change in their lives; the affluent years were only a mild surprise in a long succession of government miscalculations. They would continue to chop their own wood, plant their vegetables, bake their own bread.”

The book is split between exploring this new world she is living in, and the inner world she now has the solitude to explore. She ruminates on one of my favorite topics, time. 

“Yet the mystery is this: that whether we experience time quantitatively or qualitatively, time hasn’t changed at all, it’s we who have changed.” 

I highly recommend this book.

Storymusing.blogspot.com Review ~ by Michelle Wells

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone by Brene Brown

Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone

by Brené Brown

How could I not love a book that starts with the author invoking a couple of my favorite influences –Maya Angelou and Shonda Rhimes? I identified with so much of what Brown had to say in both her thinking and her experiences.

I could identify as a daughter who grew up in a hunting family that put meat on the table; I learned gun safety and how to shoot. I understood, very much, when she described feeling like an outsider her whole life. (Her husband says, “You’re kind of weird. An outlier in a lot of ways.”)

She is delightfully funny, like when she describes doing Soul Sunday with Oprah and Oprah asks whether she wants to meet Maya Angelou. “Tunnel vision. Time slowed down. It’s all too much. Maybe I’m dead.” Or the way she describes the content of our most difficult stories, “I can confidently say that stories of pain and courage almost always include two things: praying and cussing. Sometimes at the exact same time.”

 “…true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

I think most of us struggle with self-acceptance but if we keep pulling out the bits and pieces we like and hold them up to the light, we’ll get there. Personally, I find them and turn them into a poem or story to share.

“Connection to a larger humanity gives people more freedom to express their individuality without fear of jeopardizing belonging.”

I believe in that connection. There is only one race on Earth, the human race. We are all inextricably bound. We all have the same basic needs. If we accept that we belong, no question, than we don’t have to worry about fitting in, and we can just show up as we are.

 “I can only conclude our world is in a collective spiritual crisis.” I believe that a lack of connection is epidemic and may be responsible for a hefty percentage of addiction.

“Mercifully, it will take only a critical mass of people who believe in finding love and connection across difference to change everything.”

This is an overwhelmingly useful and uplifting book about how to bridge that connection gap that we have been experiencing. It shares a wealth of anecdotes, thoughts, and tools that I couldn’t possibly scratch the surface of here. I hope people read it and consider her suggestions thoughtfully.

La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith

La’s Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

Though the plot in the first part of the book seemed a bit trite to me, Alexander McCall Smith’s writing and the plot in the rest of the book struck me as slice-of-life writing at it’s most beautifully realistic.

La is pursued by a young man in college, prior to World War II, and agrees to marry him. She isn’t sure she loves him at first but thinks they will make a compatible marriage. She does come to love him very much and is devastated when he runs off to be with a lover in France. His father is ashamed as well. He gives La the husband’s portion of the family business and a house in Suffolk.

La moves into the house just before World War II and the story is moved forward by some minor intrigue as La gets comfortable in her new home. But then the war arrives and La goes to apply for “war work.” They don’t have much for her. The major encourages her toward the Women’s Land Army and La ends up helping with a farmer’s chickens.

The story explores simple village life in Great Britain during World War II, what people thought and felt. How it could be affected by outsiders coming in, rationing, simple pleasures, and how distanced it was from the conflict at the same time. They grew their own vegetables. They listened to the radio for news. It’s the minutiae of daily life and the reflection that make a slice of life novel. World War II is the backdrop but life goes on in spite of those events.

La meets a friend’s brother, Tim, who works at the RAF base and together they start a village orchestra. Of course, the orchestra doesn’t really save the world but it can be argued that it saves a number of people from abject despair, La included. The orchestra creates connections between people — village people, country folk, and people from the Royal Air Force base that all need something to sustain them.

Tim gets a worker from the base, a Polish airman with a damaged eye, assigned to help at the same farm where La works. She is quite smitten but Feliks is distant.

It is a slow book but the ending may have been my favorite part as you see how things come full circle and how such simple things as a village orchestra and one person can change the world for some people. It’s about how a single life does matter and what we do, the kindness we offer, the connections we make, matter. They may be the only things that do give meaning to life on this scale.

Is it unrealistic to hope that Feliks and La meet again and share some part of their life together? There are elements of chance and there are things the characters do to make things happen. Isn’t that true to life? 

In the end, the writing skill of the author and the way he ties things together, make this an enjoyable story. The pace of life in the country, the drudgery and the simple pleasures, make it enjoyable. If you’ve experienced that, you’ll recognize it. If you haven’t, you may find it enjoyable to see it from a distance.