Under a Pole Star, by Stef Penney

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Stef Penney

I received this book thanks to Netgalley

What do you do when your hometown is beaten by a dreadful heatwave? You read one of Stef Penney’s stories to find yourself transported to the most northern, snowy and chilly places of the earth.

 

Under a Pole Star is a fictional recreation of the first expeditions who went to the North Pole in the late 1800s, journeys that were equally thrilling and dangerous. The main character is Flora Mackie, a motherless girl who, from the age of twelve, is taken by his father to Ellesmere Island on his whaler, spending most of her younger years living with the Eskimos. However, as she grows up into a young woman, his father no longer thinks a ship full of men is suitable for her, so she is left in Britain to get a formal education. But, for Flora, the North is her home and, despite women don’t travel to such places, she sets up an unprecedented expedition, leaded by herself.

I have enjoyed so much reading about these expeditions. First of all, they had to find sponsors to cover all the costs, to whom they would later named newly discovered peaks and lakes after. The men spent the winter in the Eskimos’ villages trading, packing and planning for their trips, which started in springtime and must inevitably include Eskimo hunters with their dog sleds, because the British and American men were unable to provide food or transportation for themselves under such conditions.

And then, from a humanly approach, the explorers were under the pressure of discovering something to bring back home, to have a successful adventure that claimed new land to their countries, to discover new species, new islands, new whatever; and such pressure may lead some of them to embellish their notes up to the point of deceiving the general public in order to get new funds for further journeys. All in an atmosphere of competition among the different expeditions in a land where the best you can do to survive is work together.

I could be talking about the expeditions forever, but coming back to the main storyline, I loved to see a female character leading groups of men into the Arctic. Everyone was really surprised to see a woman there – except for the Eskimos, who knew Flora since she was a child and could speak with her in their own language – so she had to look and act severe to be respected. The story also includes a romance between Flora and Jakob de Beyn, an American geologist who meets in Greenland, and goes back and forth between the two, one in America and the other in Britain. They share a deep fascination for those remote lands and the lack of attachment to the rest of the world, and this understanding leads to a unique love story.

I can’t help but recommend this book that, for me, has everything: historical notes about the golden age of explorers in the Arctic, a woman assuming what at the time was a man’s role, beautiful but indomitable lands, and a delightful romance.

PS: I chose this book because I have already read Penney’s The tenderness of wolves (review), which I also enjoyed.

Under a Pole Star
Stef Penney
Quercus Books
610 pages

Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone, by J.K. Rowling

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J.K. Rowling

When the first books of Harry Potter became so popular I was a little too old for children’s books and I never came to read them; but afterwards, as an adult, I have always known I had to give them a go. I was sure I would enjoy that magical world, and I’m glad I turned out to be right!

I’m not summarizing the story everybody knows too well, but I wanted to share some of my thoughts on the book. First of all, I would have loved to grow up having a fictional friend like Harry, and now I truly understand all those people who are devoted fans of the books and films. I loved the three main characters, especially Hermione because she is a hoity-toity girl, but she came from a muggle family and I’m sure all she wanted was to prove herself worthy of attending such a school like Hogwarts. Regarding Harry, I had to fight back tears while reading how miserable his life with his aunt and uncle was – I literally wept when I read he wore broken glasses (I don’t know why this particular detail touched me, but touched I was), and also when his uncle left him alone at the train station, clueless about how to find the platform 9 and ¾. Seriously, it was painful to imagine a child so unloved. On the other hand, I had a wonderful time with all the adventures Harry, Hermione and Ron go through in Hogwarts, and with all the magic that filled every page.

I suppose this is the first sketch of what is to come in the next books: a child who will have to live up to the magic world’s expectations in the fight against the evil, the power of true friendship, and the fact that sometimes it’s OK to break the rules in order to save the world. It’s so full of excitement that I’m sure I’ll continue with the series.

I think Harry Potter is a read every one would enjoy, even if you have outgrown the recommended age for these children’s books. It’s never too late to believe in magic  😉

Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone
J.K. Rowling
Bloomsbury Publishing, 225 pages

The unicorn road, by Martin Davies

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Martin Davies

One day, when I was studying English and beginning to read my first “real” books (meaning not those short ones for students that are in fact summaries of other novels), the book fair for second hand books arrived in town, and there was a stand with a tiny line of English books which made my day… until I took a closer look at them – the majority of the books were crime novels (not my genre), the rest were the Sookie Stackhouse series (I had already read them in Spanish), and then, I found this one. I was not sure if this was a fantasy book or what, but it was in ENGLISH, and I was there to purchase, people! No eventuality could have got me out of my way!

So I travelled back to the 13th century and I started this journey with a party of men who are asked by the king Manfred of Sicily to find a legendary beast. Antioch, an old scholar with a bestiary as a guide, has to travel to the Far East and bring back an animal marvelous enough to please the Pope. The scholar is not alone, though, since he will be protected by a small army whose leader, count Decious, was one of the greatest soldiers of that time. A little boy, apprentice of the scholar, travels with them, and in Asia they would also require the skill of a man called Venn, a translator who has learned all the languages of every spot in this vast and wild world. Years later, the boy’s father travels through Europe in order to find what happened to his son – the posse never came back and no one seems to know their fate.

In addition to this story, there is also a young woman who traveled to the Emperor’s court in order to marry a soldier she met in her little village, with whom she fell in love. And the path she walked would be the same as the party’s, both looking for different outcomes.

I have to words to explain how much I enjoyed this novel. There are several characters and every one of them has their importance within the whole story, but perhaps in the end the reader becomes really fond of Venn, the translator, and Ming Yueh, this poor girl who voluntarily travels away from her people in order to pursue a better future for herself, which turned out different from her expectations.

The narration is lovely too; the descriptions of the scenery, the great city and the harbors, and also the different points of view of every character; the way the different groups of men see each other makes you become part of the story. There is also a special issue I particularly loved: Ming Yueh and the other women of the East know a secret language with which she leaves messages to people along her way, and it’s this language what will bring Venn to her. Isn’t it beautiful, the power of words linking people?

And finally I liked the structure of the novel, addressing the desperate search of the boy’s father in every other chapter and, next, the actual events of the men who went to find a unicorn.

The unicorn road will break your heart, but it’s worth it.

The Unicorn road
Martin Davies
Published by Hodder & Stoughton
330 pages
Book on Goodreads

PS: I want to thank Joy for the helping me with the review.

The Martian, by Andy Weir

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Andy Weir

If you ask me for the genres I don’t like, I would first mention horror, followed by science-fiction. But guys, that was before I read The Martian!

Mark Watney is left alone in Mars during a sandstorm, when the crew had to evacuate and thought Watney was dead. But he is not. The astronaut has no way to contact Earth to tell them he is alive, and the next mission to land on Mars is scheduled in 4 years, so this man has a problem. The fact that the food he has would feed him only for less than a year before starving to death doesn’t help either. But Watney is a resourceful guy and soon he comes up with a plan: plant potatoes on Mars!

The adventures of Watney on Mars will keep you glued to the book. The story is told through daily entries he keeps in case he finds a solution to send them, but soon we start knowing what’s going on on Earth and also with Watney’s crew on their way home. This astronaut is a genius for the way we works on staying alive and getting a way to communicate with NASA, and he is also very joyful despite the situation he is in, so the book is going to lift your spirits. It talks a lot about science, though, but I think it is explained very well even for non-science people so that anyone can follow Watney’s operations.

Watney’s wisdom

I listened to the audiobook, being this the first fiction novel I haven’t read in Spanish before that I have listened to, and I think the narrator totally becomes Mark Watney. It’s like he is real and tells you what he is doing. I was so engrossed in the novel that, near the end, I had to stop, take a few minutes to think about the possible outcomes of the story (because the reader doesn’t have the slightest idea about what is going to happen), sob a little in advance in case he didn’t get it, and then continue with the book.

I really recommend it.

I think that the film will be on theatres in October, and it looks really good, doesn’t it? Be careful if you still haven’t read it and you plan to, because the trailer reveals most of the story:

The wolf, by Joseph Smith

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Joseph Smith

The exams took place two weeks ago and I’m still trying to get back to normal. When I finally put on a pair of jeans and left my pajamas and text books at home to go to work, I noticed the world hadn’t stopped and waited for me; far from that!

However, and despite all the laws and codes I have been hanging out with for the last month, I also found time to read a little, and some of the books I’ve read have turned out to be some of my “future” favourites of the year, even though they are not new publications (we are talking about Rosamunde Pilcher or To kill a mockinbird, for example). I’ll try to review briefly some of them these days.

This book is actually a novella because it is quite short, but it stands out for its originality – the narrator is a wolf, and he places the reader in a cold winter, in the middle of a forest, with not so many chances to fill up your belly.

This wolf interacts with other animals in the forest – a prospective prey, another carnivorous competitor – and the way they communicate is beautifully explained in the book: the animals look one another in the eye, and they share their thoughts, the life they have been living before the encounter, and their will to survive. That said, a strong prey could tell the wolf without a word that she is not to surrender easily, and the wolf might answer showing her all the preys he has killed before and how hungry he is now. And the chase begins.

Remember: we are deep in the forest, and there happy endings don’t always take place.

The wolf
Joseph Smith
160 pages
UK: Jonathan Cape (Random House Mondadori)

My copy of the book (in Spanish). I love the illustration of this cover

Panic, by Jeff Abbott

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Jeff Abbott

As part of the event 30 authors in 30 days (#30Authors), this week I’m posting a review written by Jeff Abbott and, since I had not read any book by him, I thought the time had come. It’s a shame that, among more than a dozen books he has out, only two of them have been translated into Spanish. So well, I chose Panic to read and review for the event.

Evan Casher is a documentary filmmaker with a normal life who one day goes to visit his mother and discovers she has been murdered. Evan himself is almost killed too, but in the end a man helps him and tells him that his parents were secret agents who bought and sold secrets to the US government and other companies. Evan doesn’t have much time to give some thought to that unbelievable revelation because he is being chased by dangerous people, so his only chance is to look for what his parents really were and try to understand why there are people interested in him now.

This is the classic thriller, with a lot of surprises, twists and very evil characters – one of them I think is up to the point of insanity – which make the reader get glued to the pages. I liked the explanation about what really happened with Evan’s parents; it was really unexpected. However, I didn’t like that amount of characters involved in the plot; they were too many and this made me loose track with the story: if you read the book little by little, as I did, you may forget some of the names and get a little lost when you pick it up again.

Summarizing, Panic is a good read if you look for entertainment; the kind of book that you can perfectly imagine as a film with all that action sequences – chases, murders, secrets and federal agencies involved.

The passage, by Justin Cronin

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Justin Cronin

Once upon a time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, a group of researchers who travelled to the jungle of Colombia found a virus which seemed to cause extreme strength and longevity in wild animals. At that time, the secret services thought that this virus would make a difference once purified and applied to US soldiers, and that was when they began to carry out some experiments with human beings: the subjects were prisoners sentenced to death, and even an orphan girl of six, Amy, was inoculated with the virus. But nobody could have known that those who once were men now were able to feed your dreams and control people’s minds. That was how the human race disappeared.

One hundred years later, a small colony of people survive in the middle of nowhere. Three generations before, a group of children were moved there in order to keep them away from the plague of ‘virals’, but so many decades later there is no hope that anybody will ever come to rescue them. There is one thing that keeps them alive: the lights which turn on every night and protect them from the evil beings that are awaiting them in the darkness. And can you imagine what would happen if the lights turn off? You will know soon.

When you re-read a book it is only because you loved it the first time. I was abducted by The passage story the first time I read it; I couldn’t stop reading and, for a week, my life turned only around little Amy and the many theories about her and the other characters that came to my mind at every page. I felt fear, because in this novel of almost one thousand pages a lot of things are told, but the untold is even more disturbing.

There is only one downside: at about three hundred pages the rhythm of the book slows down because a wide range of new characters of the colony are introduced then, and you just aren’t prepared to get separated so abruptly from the previous ones; from Amy and a world that has been extinguished forever. But don’t worry; you will eventually get used to the pace of the colony and you’ll know their main rule: if you fail with your first shot, you die.

Notes:

• Every time I watch the book trailer, it gives me the chills.
• I can’t believe that Cronin’s daughter, a girl of nine, was the one who had the idea of the plot (interview).
• I have re-read it because the second book of the trilogy, The twelve, has just been published in Spain and I wanted to remember everything before reading it. And I’m very happy also because thus I have the review on this blog.
• Book on Goodreads ♦ Book on Amazon.com

Ghost of Lost Eagle, by Dean Sault

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Dean Sault

I received this book for review thanks to Virtual Authors Book Tours and I choose it just because I had never read a western before and I thought it would be fun.

The story begins when Tuck, a young boy who is on his way to his aunt’s ranch, gets caught on a flashflood and is saved by a stubborn cowgirl called Sass. Tuck looses all his goods in the flood, so he has to find a job in order to get money and keep on crossing the country, and he finally happens to work for Sass’ father, Phil. This arrangement makes Sass mad at the beginning, but little by little she becomes less bossy, and even she would stop calling him Dumbass!

There on the ranch, Tuck has to do some cattle counting and be sure that there are not fights between white and Mexican cowboys, but what he doesn’t know is that there are some bad guys among the men, and even Phil is scared of them, his own workers. Besides, Tuck starts having strange dreams in which Lost Eagle, an old Indian who lived hidden in those mountains, talks about his destiny.

I enjoyed the adventures of this book: the bad guys, the counting on the fields including angry bulls which attack any man they find in their territories; the way Mexicans resolve love problems; the Indian ghost and the wolves howling at nights, etc. Everything was so cinematographic, but the bulk of the book deals with the love story between Tuck and Sass and I found it rather predictable, which is a shame. I would also have liked to know why the ghost appears only to Tuck and not to other people, for example; because it happens just when he begins to work on Phil’s ranch and I think it needs further explanation.

You know I always have some downsides for every book I read, but on the whole this western has been perfect for reading after my English exam: fast, entertaining and easy to read. Besides, I would like to point out that this book has a few Spanish words which are correctly spelled, and I can’t say the same about other novels that I have read.

Author Dean Sault is offering $2.00 off of signed print copies and ebooks of Ghost of Lost Eagle, ordered from his website, during the tour.

Links to the author and the book:

• Book on Goodreads ♦ Book on Amazon.com
• Dean Sault’s web
• Dean Sault on Facebook
• Dean Sault on Twitter
• Dean Sault on Google+

The ruby brooch, by Katherine Lowry Logan

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Katherine Logan

I came across this author when I began to follow a group of indie authors on Goodreads, and from the beginning I was interested in this book, which seemed to be a romance and adventure book – a combination that I love – so when I received an email saying that the book will be for free as a promotion on Amazon, I decided to tell everybody in case you wanted to read it with me. And that’s how we read and discussed the book together last month on Facebook 😀

The main character in The ruby brooch is Kit MacKlenna, a woman in her twenties who has lost her family in a car accident. Just then, she reads her father’s diary and discovers that they were not her natural parents: she was abandoned as a baby at the door of their house with a magical brooch that lets you travel in time. Her father carried out his own research and even though he didn’t find Kit’s parents, he discovered that they were killed, so she decides to go into the past and find out what happened to them.

With appropriate equipment that includes an iPod, a digital camera, medical supplies and her pets, she travels back to Missouri in 1852, where a wagon train is about to leave to San Francisco on a route that goes through the last clue to the whereabouts of Kit’s parents. And there she meets Cullen, a Scottish lawyer leading the journey, who Kit already knows since his ghost has been haunting her for several years. Is this a coincidence?

The book starts giving away very little information that the reader would discover eventually during the reading. The journey is full of obstacles that Kit is able to overcome, sometimes thanks to the skills she has as a woman of the 21st century; so she involuntarily does some things that make the others think she is strange and, in the end, she tells Cullen her secret, once they are in love.

I liked the love story; I felt the chemistry between Kit and Cullen and I liked the fact that they had to face the question about the place and time where they wanted to live together, which was quite complicated. Cullen is the kind of male character that I like in romances I read: educated, strong and sensible. Kit is also strong and self-confident, even when she is in a strange place on her own, but sometimes she got on my nerves when she argued with Cullen for nothing at all.

The adventures are entertaining and there were some details that surprised me, for example the way the characters try to contact with each other through time – it was quite imaginative! – or how people of the nineteenth century got used to modern technology. Otherwise, I also found other things that didn’t convince me: Kit is a virgin (like Bella in Twilight, like Anastasia in Fifty shades of Grey… Why?) and the way the engagement between Cullen and his fiancée ends is too suitable for him.

Apart from these little details, I have to say that I enjoyed the book from the beginning to the end and I would recommend it if you like the type of story full of romance and adventures.

It has also been great to share our thoughts about the book with other bloggers and with the author herself, who has explained us how she did her research for the book by traveling through a similar route the first pioneers travelled two hundred years ago.

Links to the author and the book:

• Katherine L. Logan’s web
• Katherine L. Logan on Twitter
• Katherine L. Logan on Facebook
• The ruby brooch on Amazon.com
• The ruby brooch on Goodreads

Other participant’s reviews:

• Ciska’s review (English)
• Mariuca’s review (Spanish)
• Melinda’s review (English)
• Nube’s review (Spanish)
• Lidia’s review (Spanish)
• Sasy’s review (Spanish)
• My review in Spanish.

Keep calm and read 20 books in English: 12/20

Lord of the flies, by William Golding

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William Golding

Lord of the flies is one of the books recommended for my English exam: in the second part of the writing I can answer a question about the recommended books, so I wanted to have the chance to do it if I see that the other questions are uninspiring (and they usually are!).

Lord of the flies is the story of a group of children who end up alone, without any adults, in a desert island after an airplane crash. There are many “littluns”, 6-year-old children, and the main characters of the book, who are boys of over 12 years old and are the ones who represent the different aspects of human nature. Piggy is the reasonable one, physically weak but with a lot of practical ideas; Ralph is chosen as the leader of the group and is strong and charismatic; Jack is the other alpha male that at the beginning is happy to lead the group of hunters, but when he realizes that he is the one who is able to bring meat to the others, then wants more leadership within the group.

The book tries to show us that human beings are evil and bad workers just because our nature is like that, but this brings up more questions than answers – what would have been the fate of humankind if we are hadn’t been able to cooperate with each other in a tribe? I really think that we wouldn’t have survived beyond the Paleolithic.

When I read it in English, I looked for information about the book in Wikipedia, and I realized that I had missed a lot about things of the story, for example the fact that one of the boys represents religion and mysticism, so I read it again in Spanish and I didn’t get the point either. I just noticed another thing that didn’t convince me: the lack of guilty in the boys when they become savages and kill the ones that the day before were their friends, which takes me back to the other point about the survival of humankind. Besides, they should have been working together because they had a common enemy to fight against: “the beast”. Not to mention that no one looks after the littluns, and I don’t know much about little children, but I suppose that at that age you can hardly survive by eating the fruit you find in the forest.

To summarize, I suppose I didn’t like the book because I don’t want to think that we are like those boys on the island. Otherwise, I think this is a good book to discuss.

Keep calm and read 20 books in English: 13/20

Classics: 6th and 7th/10

Literary exploration: Dystopia