Book Reviews

It's been a while since I've done a book review, but I haven't stopped reading. (Just in case you were worried!) Here's a few:

Starcrossed by Elizabeth C. Bunce

Digger is a thief. She doesn't really say a lot about how that started, but it's worked for her for a while. Until now. Now her partner is dead and she's got to find a way out of the city before she gets captured.

Luckily for her, she falls in with a group of nobles out on the town. She makes up a new name and a cover story and they accept her, making her lady's maid to one of the young women. She gets a safe passage out of the city, but what has she gotten into? She gets forced into spying for one of the religious zealots who are running the government. Turns out everyone has a secret, and Digger is in more danger now that ever before.

I liked this story when I read it, but later, when I came back to review it, I had to look it up to remind myself what it was about. It was pretty good, but not anywhere near A Curse as Dark as Gold, her twist on Rumpelstiltskin. And from the reviews I've read, I don't think I'll read the next one in the series. Some readers will love it, but it didn't really stand out for me. And just so you know, I understand the next one has a been of sexual content.


The Family That Couldn't Sleep by D. T. Max

So you've been having trouble sleeping? I bet your trouble is nothing compared to what this Italian family has gone through. They are cursed with the gene that causes Fatal Familial Insomnia, which is pretty much just what it sounds like. You inherit it, and you can't sleep, and you die. A few other things happen too, but that's the killer. The brain, and the rest of the body too, needs sleep.

But that's just the beginning of this book, although the author comes back to the family over and over. The real subject of the book is prion disease, that weird little twist that lets renegade proteins act like a virus and attack the body in ways that science can't yet combat.

The most familiar of these, and the only one that I recognized at the outset as a prion disease, is Mad Cow Disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy or BSE. That "spongiform" part is because it basically turns the brain into a spongy, gooey, hole-riddled mass. (Sorry if you were eating. Hope it wasn't beef.) And because the disease is caused by a deformed protein, cooking it will not not kill the disease. Neither will radiation, alcohol, antibiotics. In fact, almost nothing will kill it. It's seriously bad news.

I really liked this book. It reads more like a mystery. He does tend to throw around some medical jargon, and then later he'll oversimplify to avoid the jargon, so it's not perfect. But it was a read that will keep you up at night.


Goliath, by Scott Westerfeld

If you like teen sci-fi, you really ought to check out this series. I don't want to give too much away, but it was a quite satisfying ending to a thoroughly fun series. It wasn't quite as good as I hoped, but it was super fun. And it features Nikola Tesla as a crazy inventor, so how can you beat that? No spoilers, but the series features a prince in disguise fleeing after the murder of his parents and a girl in disguise who's joined the English Air Force. It's all steampunk and alternate history with the Darwinians versus the Mechanics and it's loads of fun.


So pass on the first book, but I recommend the second two, and I hope I gave you some ideas for the next time you need a good book.