Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Thistle

harry_potter_death_hallows_400Warning: This review necessarily contains spoilers. If you have not read this series and might one day, please don’t read any further!

We’ve come to the final installment of my Harry Potter hardback/paperback comparison. It was in finally getting the paperback version of Deathly Hallows last summer that enabled me to start work on this project in the first place. Since the third book in the series, I’ve documented changes made to the text between hardback and paperback printings (the first two didn’t have any changes). So, how did Deathly Hallows compare?

Shock. No changes at all.

Well, perhaps that’s not true. It’s true to say I found no changes. I also verified the bottoms of each page to make sure they each lined up, so there were no major changes that affected text placement. If there were little word changes that didn’t alter the pages, I’m afraid in the case of Deathly Hallows, I didn’t catch them. I’m fully aware that this is my own fault: I haven’t read the book nearly as often as the others in the series (~10 as opposed to ~25), so I don’t have the book as memorized as the others. Whereas in the other books, I will notice word differences because I’ve read them all long enough to know exactly what the phrasing should sound like, I just don’t know Deathly Hallows to that degree. So there may have been changes I missed. However, there weren’t any major changes.

This was disappointing, actually, because Deathly Hallows is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, far more than in any other book in the series.

  • Suddenly polyjuice potion doesn’t have to be taken every hour, but instead lasts longer if you take more at one time.
  • If all you have to do to get beyond a Fidelius Charm’s power is to side-along apparate in with someone, why wouldn’t Snape have brought Death Eaters to Grimmauld Place a long time ago? I’m sure V would have known about that loophole…
  • How in the world is Snape talking to Dumbledore’s portrait in the summer, well before he’s appointed Headmaster by V? Wouldn’t the other teachers have seen him and get him arrested/captured?
  • And while we’re on that subject, how does V expect Snape to continue to be well-informed after he kills Dumbledore and the Order thinks he’s a double-crosser? Wouldn’t V expect Snape to no longer be so well-informed? The fact that Snape is still bringing in information from the Order ought to be very suspicious to V.
  • The time the Potters spent in Godric’s Hollow under the Fidelius Charm is inconsistent with what’s been said in previous books. They apparently spent months there, considering Lily sent Sirius a letter right after Harry’s birthday (July 31) and V doesn’t kill them until Halloween. Harry even speculates that this is the last time Wormtail might have seen the Potters – but if that’s true, why did it take V 3 months to attack? Besides, in previous books, it said the attack came barely a week after the Fidelius Charm was performed.
  • There’s also an inconsistency in the time between the deaths of Dumbledore’s mother and sister. Most of the book seems to place it around a few months over the summer, with Mom dying at the end of the school year and Sis dying right before school began. Still, at the same time Elphias Doge says that in that time, he took the traditional year-long around the world trip. He says Sis died at the end of that year, and states he was at both funerals, but also states he completed his year’s journey.
  • The potion in the cave where the locket is kept shouldn’t have been there when Dumbledore and Harry journeyed there at the end of Half Blood Prince. Regulus drank it when he slipped the fake horcrux in there. It’s not a self-replicating potion, because when V tested it with Kreacher, he had to pour more in manually. It never says Regulus poured more in, and even if he did, Dumbledore and Harry certainly didn’t. And yet, when V goes to check on his locket, the text says he stares down at the bowl whose contents have turned clear and sees no locket under the surface.
  • V puts a taboo/jinx on his name, so that anytime anyone says it, it removes all protection around the person who said it and causes a disturbance so the Death Eaters know where to find them. That allows the Death Eaters to find Harry right after the wedding and then later in the woods. However, both Harry and Hermione say “Voldemort” multiple times while they’re living in Grimmauld Place, while the jinx was already in place. However, they are still protected and the Death Eaters don’t know where they’re at. Why?? That doesn’t make sense!
  • Harry gives the fake horcrux locket to Kreacher. A locket would be considered clothes, right? I mean, Kreacher later wears the thing! Giving a house-elf clothes should free him, but in this case, it doesn’t seem to…
  • When they evacuate Hogwarts, they send the kids into the Hog’s Head to disapparate out of the bar. However, Aberforth already said it’s impossible to apparate out of Hogsmeade at that time, plus many of those kids are well below 17 and don’t know how to apparate.
  • On page 737, Harry tells V that one of them is about to leave for good (during their last battle). V says, “One of us? You think it will be you, do you, the boy who has survived by accident, and because Dumbledore was pulling the strings?” Maybe I’m just missing something, but it seems like this sentence is all wrong. Why would V think that Harry would think Harry’s the one about to die? Why would he be jeering and laughing at him for thinking that? After three years of reading this book, I still can’t figure out what V is trying to say here…it makes me think Harry was supposed to say one of them was about to stay for good or something.

I knew some of these wouldn’t get fixed – plot developments depended on them – but I hoped at least some would get cleared up in the paperback version! These errors/inconsistencies, as well as that awful King’s Cross chapter where we all sit down to let Dumbledore explain everything that we couldn’t figure out, take a book that might otherwise be a favorite of mine and make it just meh. It’s the middle-liked book for me – I like books 3, 5, and 6 more, while liking 1, 2, and 4 less. That’s too bad, because otherwise Deathly Hallows is a beautiful and well-written book! The Prince’s Tale is my favorite chapter in the whole series, and Bathilda’s Secret is in my opinion the creepiest chapter of the whole series. I was hoping the paperback version would clear some things up, but I guess now that we were at the last volume, they decided not to make any changes this time around.

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Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, by JK Rowling

Posted on June 2, 2010 by Thistle

hp6It’s Month 6/Book 6 of my Harry Potter hardback/paperback comparison! Half Blood Prince is one of my two favorite HP books, so I was very excited to dive into it. This is the first month where I’m reading the paperback version instead of the hardback, as it’s the first book I owned originally in hardback. It was a slightly different way of thinking – seeing how things were corrected and changed from the version I’m used to, rather than seeing what was originally there instead of the corrected version I’m used to.

Compared to Order of the Phoenix, the changes made to book #6 were very, very mild. Order of the Phoenix was INSANE in the number of changes. Half Blood Prince only had a couple very minor changes and one big change.

Be forewarned: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS HERE. It’s impossible to do this project without spoilers, so if you haven’t read Harry Potter and might do so someday, please don’t read any further!

Minor errors:

Page 100 – In the HB version, Ron says to Hermione, “And when you’ve got your eleven ‘Outstanding’ O.W.L.s…” This is wrong, because Hermione is only taking ten classes. She’s taking two different ones from Ron and Harry, but she’s also not in divination, so she’s only taking one more class than them. When I found out the HB & PB versions were different, the very first thing I did was go to the store to look up this particular mistake and make sure it was corrected in the paperback. It is. The pb version says, “And when you’ve got your ten ‘Outstanding’ O.W.L.s…”

Page 103 – Same error fixed. Ron says “Yep – ten ‘Outstanding’ and one ‘Exceeds Expectations’” in the hardback, whereas it’s “Yep – nine ‘Outstanding’ and one ‘Exceeds Expectations’” in the paperback.

Page 593 – From hardback to paperback, the second instance of “of” (bolded) is removed from the following statement: Harry could smell a powerful mixture of dirt, sweat, and, unmistakeably, of blood coming from him. It’s just parallel writing error, very minor. I only caught it at all because it changed the line endings in a section where I was paying particular attention to word placement, due to page-end changes caused by the major error mentioned below.

Major error:

This error actually involves the removal of sections on a particular paragraph that overlaps both pages 592 and 593. I’m going to write the paragraph in full, hardback version, and bold the parts that are removed in the paperback version. This is when Dumbledore is talking to Draco Malfoy when Draco has him cornered on top of the tower.

“He cannot kill you if you are already dead. Come over to the right side, Draco, and we can hide you more completely than you can possibly imagine. What is more, I can send members of the Order to your mother tonight to hide her likewise. Nobody would be surprised that you had died in your attempt to kill me – forgive me, but Lord Voldemort probably expects it. Nor would the Death Eaters be surprised that we had captured and killed your mother – it is what they would do themselves, after all. Your father is safe at the moment in Azkaban. . . . When the time comes, we can protect him too. Come over to the right side, Draco . . . you are not a killer. . . .”

Everything in bold was removed in the paperback text. From what I’ve heard, these sections were never actually supposed to appear in the text. Rowling removed them at the last minute, but they went to print in America before they were caught. If I remember correctly, the British version does not have them in there either. I can’t check – I only have a paperback British copy and I don’t know if the paperback and hardback British versions are different like they are in the American versions. Anyone with a hardback British version want to check that for me?

That’s it for Book 6! It was relatively tame compared to the last couple books. See you guys next month with my final installment of the Harry Potter hb/pb comparisons!

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Little Bee, by Chris Cleave

Posted on May 30, 2010 by Thistle

6948436This is the story of two women. Little Bee is a refugee from Nigeria in Britain. Sarah is a wife, mother, and magazine editor, also in Britain. This is the story of how their lives collide and intertwine.

I’ve seen various reviews for Little Bee around and I admit I never thought I’d read it. I never would have, except I ended up at the airport without a book on my way home from BEA. There weren’t a lot of choices in the airport bookstore, but I saw this one on the shelf and I knew a lot of people had been talking about it recently.

It was a good choice. While I doubt the book will stick with me forever, it’s a solid literary adult book about the way decisions we make will affect us for the rest of our lives. It talks in depth about the broken refugee and immigration system in Britain, and it addresses issues such as infidelity, motherhood, and the balance between home and work. The writing and characterization are both strong. I liked Little Bee (the character) but didn’t care for Sarah or her choices at all, though she was (depressingly) believable. I don’t want to say too much about the plot and give things away, but it was a satisfying read in the way it was paced and the way it ended. A good choice for me when I was in a tight spot.

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Matched, by Ally Condie

Posted on May 29, 2010 by Thistle

7735333Cassia lives in a future world where the government controls all aspects of life, from your job to the number of kids you can have to the date of your death. Most importantly, the government is also responsible for choosing your perfect Match. People are usually Matched with others from different cities throughout Society, so Cassia is surprised when her best friend’s face comes up on the screen during her Match ceremony. She’s even more surprised, however, when a second face briefly appears in a “malfunction,” a face she also recognizes.

I need to say, up front, that I can’t review this book in an unbiased way. Many of my readers know, but some new ones may not, that I wrote a book in 2008 called MatchMakers Incorporated, which had a eerily similar premise and very similar world-building to Ms Condie’s. My book was out at agents when Matched was announced, and was actually rejected by some agents because the book was so similar in premise. It took me months to cope with this, and once I got to a stable level again, I took steps to try to make myself feel better about Matched. I talked to Ms. Condie, first through comments on her blog and later in person at BEA. I also got an ARC of the book and read it before I even left NYC. These things helped me process the situation, and will hopefully help me change my book around so that our two books can both comfortably sit on the market one day without crowding each other.

Ally Condie is a very sweet person and I wish her all the best with this book. Selfishly, I actually want Matched to do well. Very well. There’s a good possibility that my book will never be picked up because of Matched, and if that’s so, these concepts and this world that was so intimate and dear to me – well, I want them to be out in the world, garnering support, becoming loved by readers. I was scared, when I started the book, that I would have issues with the writing or I would find the book shallow or hasty or any number of other things that bother me in books. I can’t tell you how great my relief was to find none of these things.

The book is very well written. Great characterization, great world-building, great prose. It’s a bit on the surface-level-side of YA, where there’s more high concept than deep philosophy, but it works for this book. There’s tension and the book makes you want to keep reading. There’s a cliffhanger, but it’s not one of those books that end on such an abrupt note that you’re unsatisfied. It’s a good balance between closure and wanting more.

I’m sort of at a loss on how to review the book, coming from my particular situation, but I do want to say that it’s good. I really enjoyed reading it, even if I wished I’d found the world Cassia lived in to be more different from the world I’d built. And of course, I have to admit it still hurts to know what might have been. At the same time, I’m really glad this was so well done. In an odd way, that comforts me.

One more note: The cover of this book is absolutely fantastic, one of the best covers I’ve seen in a long time.

Note: I originally read this book in May 2010 but held the review until the release date in November 2010. I no longer have the date of my original post, so I’m simply posting it on the date I finished reading.

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Nana, by Émile Zola

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Thistle

nanaNana doesn’t really have a plot I can describe. It involves a woman named Nana, a cheap “tart” as she’s called who sells her body for money but not on the streets like a prostitute. She’s picked up by a theatre even though she can’t act or sing, simply because she is so seductive that men can’t resist her. Through the theatre, her world grows, until she becomes one of the richest women in Paris, with many men at her feet. Her wealth is unsatisfying, though – she can never be satisfied. One want leads to the next, ever growing, ever more greedy.

I have to say first off that my second foray into Zola was not nearly as satisfying as my first. While Germinal was a brilliantly-written novel, full of passion and pain and hope and despair, Nana was just sort of blasé for most of the book. Part of it, I could tell, was the translation, which was far dryer than that of Germinal. Oh how I wish Leonard Tancock had translated all of Zola’s books! But it wasn’t just the translation. Part of it was the story itself.

I get really bored of classic novels about rich people. Maybe I’ve just read too many of them, but this book struck me as, “Yep, they’re rich, they’re depraved under their fine suits, and they’re destined for downfall, what’s new?” The details of the theatre production, which went on for 30 pages, felt like 200 pages of detail. Tedious, long-winded, boring. So many characters were introduced – I think that’s one of Zola’s signatures – that I couldn’t keep them straight, though by the end of the book I knew everyone intimately. And this is where I can say that Zola truly shines: his characters aren’t like characters. They’re people. Even if at the beginning it’s so confusing – it’s so hard to keep them straight, without ever describing those people – by the end of the book you know who is who and exactly their personalities. Zola is the ultimate voice in show-not-tell. He’s a wonderful example of what an author can put into a reader’s brain without ever saying a word.

I did end up enjoying the book, not nearly as much as Germinal, of course, but enjoyable anyway. I would think I was getting tired of it and I’d put it away, only to have an almost nostalgic feeling of wanting to go back to the story and see what happens next. When I wasn’t reading it, it felt like an old friend I wanted to go revisit. I could tell that Zola was carving open new paths in my brain and filling them with stuff, even if I didn’t necessarily see all that stuff at the time. It was fabulous. This is another thing that Zola seems to be brilliant at.

At some point while I was reading the novel, I read somewhere that Nana is Zola’s most challenged/banned book, and I kept wondering why. Germinal is far more racy, both in sex and violence, even though Nana is essentially a book about a high-class prostitute. But then came the scenes when Nana suddenly starts having an affair with her friend Satin, another prostitute, and then I understood. Because of some vaguely-worded allusions to lesbian sex, this book is more banned than the one where…well, I won’t say, for spoiler’s sake, but yeah. Germinal. It’s…racy. Far more racy than Nana. But Nana? Well, it has a bisexual character, that means we should ban it, right? Ugh.

There was another thing that struck me as I read through Nana. During the Classics Circuit Zola tour, I saw several people mention that they thought Zola made derogatory comments toward women, and I think nothing could be further from the truth. There were certainly lots of derogatory comments towards women made in this book; those comments reflected not on Zola, however, but on the male characters about whom he was writing. For instance, at a party where several men are scheming to get a big dinner party together which will include Nana, Zola says:

However, under his breath he contrived to whisper to Fauchery that they’d be getting Tatan Néné – the finest tits going in Paris that winter – and Maria Blond, the one who’d just made her début at the Folies Dramatiques.

Comments like this are dropped a lot – both about men and about women – and I can see some people getting real reactionary to them. However, the reaction is misplaced if it is against Zola, who obviously finds the people who think this way absolutely disgusting. He presents this sort of talk to get a reaction, to make people see just how horrible, base, and degrading this way of thinking is. He wants you to think this is disgusting. He wants you to think the people who speak like this are disgusting. It’s no secret that Zola is fairly negative about many of the people he presents in his books, both men and women. It’s important to see that it isn’t Zola himself who thinks this way, but the people he despises that do, and I think that’s a point often missed by readers.

Even though Nana wasn’t as good as Germinal, I’m still looking forward to more Zola. Next up will probably be Thérèse Raquin, La Bête Humaine, or Le Rêve.

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The First Part Last, by Angela Johnson

Posted on May 20, 2010 by Thistle

200px-The_First_Part_Last_(Angela_Johnson_novel)_cover_artBobby is a sixteen year old parent, struggling to take care of his newborn daughter, Feather. He wants to do the right thing for her, but he’s not perfect. All he can do is keep trying.

I loved this book from page 1. It’s told in interspersed chapters, past events from the time Bobby finds out his girlfriend, Nia, is pregnant, and current events as Bobby struggles to take care of Feather. Bobby is such a real person and I just wanted to hug him the whole time. I loved all of the conflict he goes through, how he struggles between being a parent and being a teenager. His parents were also wonderfully written, defying all mother and father stereotypes. Mom was strict and stubborn, Dad was sensitive and overprotective.

The whole time I read, I kept waiting to figure out why Bobby was a single dad. I wondered if Nia died or if she simply didn’t want anything to do with the baby. I wondered why the couple didn’t give Feather up for adoption. Slowly as the book goes on, all that information is given to the reader in layers, one by one. Slowly it builds up to a powerful climax, where the end of the past sections meets the beginning of the current sections. I cried. It was beautifully written and completely unexpected.

I’m not sure what else to say about this book. It’s little and takes almost no time to read, but it’s gut-wrenchingly powerful. It’s an amazing book about responsible teenage fatherhood, an unfortunately unusual situation (the responsible part, I mean). This is the sort of book I’d love for all teenagers to read, especially those who are faced with teen pregnancy. It well deserved its 2004 Printz Award.

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Carnet de Voyage, by Craig Thompson

Posted on May 18, 2010 by Thistle

Carnet_de_voyageCarnet de Voyage is Craig Thompson’s illustrated travelogue/travel journal over two months visiting France, Spain, and Morocco. He was partly doing research for his upcoming book Habibi (which I’m very much looking forward to) and partly on tour for international releases of Blankets. He warns up front that the book is a bit self-indulgent and that he doesn’t think it’s terribly well-done. Apparently he was rushed for time by the end, with a time limit and a page limit.

There is no real story to this book. Thompson travels, his hand hurts from all the signing and drawing, he gets sick a lot, especially in Morocco, and he’s homesick and lonely. Honestly, I agree with him – it is a bit self-indulgent. I guess I was just expecting more from this. I don’t know. Most of the drawing was absolutely beautiful, exactly what I’d expect from Thompson. That wasn’t disappointing. It was when he did more writing than drawing, and when he became obsessive about the grosser parts of illness, that I lost interest.

I liked the full-page drawings, the simplicity of them, the genuine seeing of the things around him, and liked less the self-centered pages of whining. I understand that it’s hard to travel, and especially to travel alone. But after awhile you have to get over yourself, and at times I lost patience, especially when Thompson was in Morocco. That was the part I was most interested in, wanting to really see Morocco come alive. That showed up in some places, but he spent most of his time there talking about how horrible all the native people were. I have no doubt many of the people he encountered were horrible, but the generalizations kind of put a bad taste in my mouth.

I’m not sorry I read Carnet. It was an interesting read and like I said, there were some beautiful drawings in it. I think I just wanted more from it, more insight into the things he saw, maybe. More like what I got in French Milk. But I guess when you’re doing a combination of research and touring on a crippled hand and an injured foot, maybe you’re not in the best headspace to be terribly insightful. This book in no way lessened my love for Thompson’s work, and I’m still very much looking forward to Habibi, but I don’t really recommend Carnet.

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Lost At Sea, by Bryan Lee O’Malley

Posted on May 17, 2010 by Thistle

Lost_At_SeaIn Lost at Sea, four teenagers are on a road trip through California. Raleigh is the outsider, picked up almost by random, and she’s suffering through a problem: she thinks she doesn’t have a soul. As the trip goes on, she becomes increasingly convinced that her soul was stolen and placed in a cat. The cats are torturing her, and she’s having a mental breakdown.

Unfortunately, Lost at Sea didn’t work for me. I loved the drawing and I thought the plot was beautiful, but then it ended so unresolved and broken. The climax contained a big pet peeve of mine – an unopened letter. I hate when books or movies or anything have an unopened letter or a diary entry that the main character never reads or pretty much any situation where enlightenment is sacrificed in some way. I know I shouldn’t hate this, that it’s a device used for a very specific purpose, but I’m an intensely curious person and it drives me nuts not to know. Those books/movies/etc leave me extremely unsatisfied because I feel like I don’t have all the information, and then I’m just angry with the author. And that’s exactly how I felt at the end of Lost at Sea. I’m left unable to appreciate the rest of this book, because of the unopened letter. Grr.

And actually, I have to admit, that wasn’t the only reason Lost at Sea disappointed me. From the very beginning of the narrative, I got a very distinct impression about what I was going to find out in the climax. For some reason, I thought I was going to discover that Raleigh’s best girl-friend, who had moved away four years ago, was the same person as the boyfriend she’d gone to California to meet. I thought this was going to be a transgendered story. I have no idea why, but I really thought it. Of course, that isn’t at all what happened, despite what I thought was heavy hinting, and in a way, that disappointed me too. Stupid to let your expectations get the better of you, but I guess we all do that, don’t we?

I wish I’d liked this one better. The art was beautiful and I really enjoyed reading the first 90% of it. It’s possible my dislike and disappointment had a lot to do with my mood. There were a string of books I read that just came across as meh to me after reading a really wonderful book, so perhaps I simply read this one at a bad time.

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Shortcomings, by Adrian Tomine

Posted on May 16, 2010 by Thistle

shortcomings-adrian-tomine-hardcover-cover-artI hardly know how to describe this graphic novel. I suppose it’s about two Asian-Americans who are dating each other, Ben and Miko. Ben is cynical and pessimistic. He’s also obsessed with non-Asian culture (ie he likes to fantasize about white women and that sort of thing). Miko is the exact opposite, enthusiastic about everything, especially about her heritage and roots. The two have been together for several years, but don’t have a very good relationship.

They decide to take a break from each other, and Miko travels from California to NYC. While she’s gone, Ben decides to date and/or sleep with some white girls. His best friend, a promiscuous Korean lesbian named Alice, both praises him and picks on him for this. Ben is unsatisfied (what else is new?) and eventually wants to reconnect with Miko, who has made her own new connections in New York.

Originally when I saw Aarti’s review of this book, I wasn’t sure if this would be a book I’d like. I put it on hold from the library in order to preview it. However, when I got it home to flip through, I ended up reading the entire thing. It was very captivating and I flew through it in less than an hour. Ben was awful in every way, denying his heritage and at the same time playing off white stereotypes, which really grated on me. I kept waiting for him to grow up. I was also exposed to a lot of Asian stereotypes that I’d actually never heard before.

Anyway, the end of this book really didn’t work for me. Nothing happens. Ben doesn’t change. Miko doesn’t change. No one learns how to appreciate other people better. No one realizes that people are the same no matter their background, culture, race, or heritage. Ironically, it felt like the book was trying to show exactly what its title says: Shortcomings. None of these people lived up to my expectations for them, and at the end, I guess I don’t know what the point was. Which is sad, because up until the end, I really, really liked the book.

Shortcomings made me very uncomfortable with how many stereotypes it upheld. Ben continued to shun Asian women in preference for the “far superior” white women, while simultaneously holding himself “unworthy” of them because he was Asian. Miko was the complete opposite, shunning everything not-Asian in order to assert herself, which is an attitude I can’t stand no matter which culture a person is from. I believe in integrated social atmosphere, where we all interact and realize we’re all the same despite physical differences. I don’t like stereotypes upheld or one culture held higher than another – be it Ben’s idea of “white is better” or Miko’s of “Asian is better.” In fact, the only character I really connected to was Alice, who was wonderfully indiscriminate and perfectly at ease with herself and her heritage.

I don’t know. I think I missed the point of this novel. I really want to understand, but it just frustrated me, especially because it was so well-written. The art is beautiful and I really enjoyed 95% of the book. I just wish the characters had learned something and grown as people. Since they didn’t, I almost felt like I wasted my time.

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Voodoo Season, by Jewell Parker Rhodes

Posted on May 14, 2010 by Thistle

voodoo-seasonMarie Levant moves from Chicago to New Orleans during her medical residency. Once there, she begins to have strange dreams that haunt her, and her knowledge of the patients that come into the emergency room border on sixth sense. Indeed, several of the other ER doctors/nurses seem to think that she has the Sight, and is perhaps the descendant of famous voodoo priestess Marie Leveau.

Girls start to show up in the emergency room, dead but with no trace of being killed, all pregnant. Marie is haunted by them. She knows she’s connected with them in some way, especially after she discovers the pregnancy and rescues one fetus from death. What she doesn’t realize is just how deep into magic and faux-magic the investigation into these deaths will go.

I loved this book from page 1. It’s so gloriously, sensually written. I’ve never lived in New Orleans but I’ve been there twice in my life, and this book captures the feel of the city so well. This book could take place nowhere else. I loved how character-driven the book is, even while a very intriguing plot ripples outwards one wave at a time. I expected the book to take me a few days to read, but I gobbled it up in a day as it thunder-stormed outside. Perfect weather for this atmosphere!

I’m afraid the second half of the book, however, did not work as well for me. Once Marie starts to face the possibility that she is connected with Marie Leveau, and once she starts to embrace the true religion of voodoo (not at all like the Hollywood style), the book became very confusing for me. So much information was introduced so quickly, mixing present and history in long passages of italics that left me reeling. I had the feeling that if I could just slow down, I would understand better, but I was so intrigued that I couldn’t slow down. In some ways it left me every bit as worn out as The Knife of Never Letting Go did. I need my down moments. Instead, all the way to the end of the book, I felt like I was being dragged behind a fast moving vehicle, gripping tightly and trying to keep up.

As it turns out, there was a reason for my confusion – this is the second book in a series. Voodoo Dreams was published about a decade before Voodoo Season, and it was all about Marie Leveau. If I’d read that first, the recap and integration of Leveau’s life into the modern day life of Marie Levant would not have been so confusing. I would not have been lost when characters from the first book appeared without warning, that sort of thing. I’m a bit angry at myself for not realizing this was the second in a series! Because like I said, it’s a gorgeously written book and I absolutely loved it. I’m sure I would have loved it even better had I read the first book first. Voodoo Season can be a standalone, but I think it would be a million times better with the background of the first book to go on.

I really do recommend Voodoo Season, despite the fact that the second half completely unraveled for me. Yes, I think it felt too fast and too scattered, but that’s a reflection on me and my ignorance more than on the book. I think if you read the books in order, it will be a much better experience than mine. Indeed, I felt TONS better after discovering why I felt so tired and confused after such a beautiful beginning.

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