Her Majesty's Witch: A Paranormal Threat to Steampunk England

Her Majesty's Witch by Eva Gordon is the suspenseful sequel to The Hand of Miriam.  As I mentioned in my review of the first novel here, I had read The Hand of Miriam for background first after having received a free copy of  Her Majesty's Witch from the author via Book Sprout.

                           

I really loved the strong woman characters in Her Majesty's Witch.  Aside from Bayla, my personal favorite was Queen Victoria, who is an important figure in the storyline. Eva Gordon portrays this monarch as being unyielding in a crisis.  She totally refused to cooperate with the villain.  The twin YA inventors, Flora and Fauna were engaging.  I was also glad to see Rosaline Channing in Her Majesty's Witch.  She is an independent minded werewolf who is introduced in the first book.

Speaking of werewolves, I normally avoid books dealing with them.  I discuss my reasons in my review of Wolf by Alma Alexander here.  Yet when I was reading Her Majesty's Witch, it occurred to me for the first time that the portrayals of werewolves that I consider most objectionable were showing them behaving as if they were wolves with rabies.  A healthy wolf who isn't infected with rabies would never feel compelled to attack humans.  This is a slander against wolves.  Real wolves avoid humans. They only attack humans in self-defense or in the defense of their families.  I feel indebted to Eva Gordon for allowing me to have a significant aha moment about a prejudice that appears so often in fiction about werewolves.

In this book, Bayla and her golem husband face a villain with an apocalyptic plan. I don't consider this a strength of the novel. It seems to me that this has been a common trope in fantasy and science fiction ever since Joss Whedon devalued the apocalypse by having his heroes averting it routinely in his popular  Buffy and Angel series.  (For more of my perspective on Joss Whedon's work, see my review of  the scholarly essay anthology Reading Joss Whedon here.)  This theme loses impact when it's overused.

Nevertheless,  my affection for established and new characters left me feeling satisfied with Her Majesty's Witch. There hasn't been a third Bayla novel.  I would like to encourage Eva  Gordon to write more about this set of characters.  There are numerous possibilities that she could pursue.

                       

                      

Berlin Breakdown: Thriller Provides Context For The Fall of the Berlin Wall

When publicist Wiley Saichek asked me to review a novel by thriller author Bill Rapp, I told him that I was most interested in Berlin Breakdown.  It deals with how and why the tearing down of the Berlin Wall came about.  This was an important 20th century event that led to the re-unification of Germany.

The only other novel that I'd read which focused on this period was a YA fantasy novel called The Girl With The Red Balloon by Katherine Locke which was highly entertaining, but since it centers on time travel and magical balloons that could transport people over the Berlin Wall, it certainly can't be considered factual.

 I wanted to know more about the history of this era.  So I accepted a review copy of  Berlin Breakdown provided by Wiley Saicheck as a gift from Amazon.

                     

My interest in this book wasn't solely historical.  I love a good thriller.  I slogged through many books in 2019, but the pages of Berlin Breakdown flew by.  American diplomat Karl Rosman braved violent confrontations with agents of the East German secret police known as the Stasi.

 You can find out about the Stasi from the Wikipedia article I've hyperlinked in the paragraph above.  Since stolen Stasi files are a focus of the plot, readers may also be interested in the Wikipedia article on the Stasi Records Agency which still exists in order to comply with requests for Stasi files, and re-assemble files that were shredded by Stasi staff in 1989 when the East German Communist government stepped down.  Both these articles confirm the portrayal of the Stasi as pervasive and totalitarian in Bill Rapp's novel.

I saw a review on Amazon that complained about characterization in this book.  I thought that character portrayal was consistent with standards in the thriller genre where books tend to be more plot driven than character driven.  Nevertheless, there were characters whose backgrounds and motivations were developed in the course of the narrative in Berlin Breakdown.  There were also some dramatic character revelations.  So I'd say that Bill Rapp's characterization was better than I usually find in thrillers.

I thought that Berlin Breakdown was well-written, and I appreciated the unusual choice of historical period.

                       

Hand of Miriam--A Jewish Historical Fantasy Reviewed by a Jewish Highlander Fan

I agreed to review the steampunk fantasy Her Majesty's Witch by Eva Gordon this month, and received a free copy from the author via Book Sprout. Her Majesty's Witch is the sequel to  Hand of Miriam.  Eva Gordon recommended reading the previous novel before the sequel.  I had actually purchased  Hand of Miriam back in 2017.    I was drawn to the concept, but review commitments or library due dates would keep on getting in the way.  So I'm glad that my promise to review Her Majesty's Witch gave me this opportunity.

                   

I was mainly looking forward to Hand of Miriam because of the Jewish content which is relatively rare in fantasy.  Eva Gordon made the wise decision to provide us with a female protagonist who is a secular Jew with more religiously observant relatives.  This meant that Bayla, the protagonist, would have some familiarity with Jewish culture, but that there would be fewer references to Jewish practices that would need to be checked for accuracy.

When I learned that Bayla's family were Ladino speaking descendants of Spanish Jews, I was concerned that the character's name might be inconsistent with her background.  You see, I knew Bayla as a Yiddish name for Jewish women of Ashkenazi/Eastern European descent.   When I researched the name , I learned that the Yiddish name was originally spelled Baila, and that Bayla was also a Spanish name with a completely different meaning from the Yiddish equivalent.  I  am happy to say  that this Orthodox raised Jewish blogger found no Jewish cultural errors in Hand of Miriam. 


The most prominent Jewish cultural symbol was the hand shaped protective object known as a Hamsa.  The hyperlink points to an article on My Jewish Learning.  As an American Ashkenazi, I hadn't heard of the Hamsa until I was gifted with one by an Israeli who informed me that it was also Islamic.  I was intrigued by the fact that the Hamsa is cross-cultural.  I hadn't seen it referred to as the Hand of Miriam until I read Eva Gordon's book, but in researching for this post I did see this association in  various online sources.

Now I need to weigh in on the swordfighting aspect of this novel.  My perspective on this  topic comes from having seen  every Highlander TV episode numerous times.  This is because I'm a Highlander series fan.  The main protagonist in Highlander: The Series uses a katana as Bayla does in The Hand of Miriam. 

The most important point I want to bring up about swordfighting is that you need significant practice with it.  Duncan MacLeod is portrayed as training constantly with his katana on the Highlander series.  There is a scene in which Bayla manages  to successfully use a katana without any previous scenes in which she practices.  Later in the novel, she does do sword training, but that early scene stuck out for me as not very believable.

There's also a scene in which Bayla produces her katana from nowhere.  She wasn't wearing the long coat Duncan MacLeod usually wears to conceal his katana, nor was she wearing any other garment where she could have kept it. Actually,  there were numerous instances when characters on Highlander: The Series produced swords from nowhere.  Highlander fans decided there must be a magical Katana Space in another dimension from which katanas could be plucked when needed. I suppose Bayla might have her own version of Katana Space. 😄

 I admit I was not fond of seeing Jack the Ripper in Hand of Miriam.  Some authors seem to be unable to resist throwing him into the mix. I consider the Jack the Ripper murder case a predictable element in books that are set in England during the Victorian Era.

Although I have some criticisms of  Hand of Miriam, I did enjoy reading it.  I hope that Her Majesty's Witch is equally entertaining.

                       

             

Larger Than Life: An Inspiring Novella About Elephants by Jodi Picoult

It was nearly the end of 2019. I was looking for a novella that I could finish before the year was over, and feel good about it.  It had to be a different experience from the total nightmare that was my last read.  Yes, it had been important for me to read The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, but I wanted a narrative about a heroic woman who was struggling to do the right thing.  This didn't mean that there wouldn't be terrible things happening.  I just wanted a window into the life of a woman who wanted to make the world a better place.

As I looked down the list of novellas that I could read on my Kindle,  I thought about authors who had really delivered more than once with powerful stories dealing with significant themes, and characters who lived in the real world but needed to make a difference.  It occurred to me that Jodi Picoult could be the author I was looking for.  Her themes run the gamut, but when she has written about someone who cares about animals I have been totally hooked. I hadn't read about elephants in either fiction or non-fiction, but Larger Than Life would be an opportunity for me to learn about this threatened species. I downloaded the novella for free from Amazon as a benefit of my Prime membership.

                          

Larger Than Life was published five years ago.  Some readers might say that the time for me to review it has passed. Admittedly, it's been some time since I've read Jodi Picoult.  Yet when I started Larger Than Life I felt like I'd come back home.  I was home even though I was in Botswana because Alice Metcalf is just the sort of protagonist that I love to read about.

I was very moved by Alice's attachments to elephants that she had studied in African wildlife sanctuaries. Her dedication to the survival of elephants was inspirational.

Over the course of the novella, Alice's characterization deepens as we discover how her mother encouraged her to become a scientist, and her ambivalent relationship with her mother.  Ada Lovelace, the originator of the computer algorithm was also encouraged by her mother, Annabella Milbanke.  In fact, the parallels between the mother/daughter relationships of Ada Lovelace and Alice Metcalf  seemed so strong to me that I wondered if Jodi Picoult had partly based the background of her protagonist on that of Ada Lovelace.

I saw a review of  Larger Than Life on Goodreads that complained about all the elephant facts.  Alice is an elephant researcher.  It would be strange to me if a story about a woman who does research didn't contain any facts about the subject she was researching.  Alice was researching elephant memory.  A study in Namibia mentioned in this novella revealed that elephants could survive drought because the herd matriarchs remembered the location of water holes that they hadn't accessed in years.

 I am interested in human memory. So I was reminded of  indigenous Australian songlines which allow them to remember the locations of waterholes and other natural features. The hyperlink will take you to the Wikipedia article about this topic.  Indigenous Australians may have something in common with elephants, but they don't have the memories of elephants.  Humans use mnemonics to assist us in recalling what we have learned.   Human memories are also built through networks of associations.  This is what allowed me to remember songlines.  The next link in my associative network was Bruce Chatwin ,who wrote The Songlines, which is where I found out about this type of mnemonic. I consider it delightful to exercise my memory in this way.  I enjoy books that give me the opportunity to do that.

 Larger Than Life is a prequel to  the Jodi Picoult novel, Leaving Time.  I loved Larger Than Life.  So I'm definitely going to want to read Leaving Time in the foreseeable future.

                           

                           

The Memory Police: A Dystopia of Learned Helplessness

I am starting this review after awarding this book Best Translation of the Year in my 2019 Retrospective post.  The quality of Yoko Ogawa's Japanese prose must be superb to inspire an English translation like the one Stephen Snyder provided.  The Goodreads page for The Memory Police notes that this translated edition was listed by the National Book Award as a finalist in the category of Translated Literature in 2019.

                         

I was trying to decide whether the genre of this book was science fiction or fantasy until relatively late in the novel.  There is much that is left mysterious by the author, but I came to the conclusion that the Memory Police were more likely to have been using some unknown technology rather than an unknown magic.  So I chose the genre label Dystopian Science Fiction.  Other readers may have a different take on this issue.

Regardless of genre, this is the most horrific book I've ever read.  I've previously indicated elsewhere that I'm not a fan of horror.  My feeling is that real life is horrific enough without adding to the horror through the media we consume.

The response of the unnamed protagonist of The Memory Police to the slow disintegration of life on the island where she lives will appear to be unacceptably passive in the eyes of many Americans.  Another perspective is that she is stoic.  It seems to me that stoicism is admirable in the face of suffering that can't be prevented.   Japanese people say "Shikata ga nai" about such situations.  I've linked the Wikipedia article about this phrase.  Most of the characters in this book do seem to think that stoicism is called for.   Those who disagree are the ones who are likely to be arrested by the Memory Police.

A really impressive character is a friend of the protagonist who is only referred to as the old man.  I want to call attention to one scene in which the protagonist and the old man were waiting on line for some time for an examination of their papers by the Memory Police before boarding a train.  An anemic girl collapsed and the old man carried her to the train.  This struck me as an act of kizuna, a Japanese  concept of compassion and generosity during an emergency.  I learned about it from The Kizuna Coast, the last Rei Shimura mystery by Sujata Massey which I reviewed here.  The old man's action was noteworthy because it shows that the Memory Police's attempt to destroy all social cohesion wasn't successful so long as someone like the old man was alive to illustrate the value of kizuna.

At one point, the novelist protagonist quotes from a source she's forgotten. "Men who start with burning books end by burning other men."  I tracked it down.  It's a quote from Heinrich Heine's play Almansor which was published in 1823. The play takes place in Grenada, Spain when it was conquered by Ferdinand and Isabella. Heine's hero, Almansor, is a Muslim.  He spoke that line when he found out that the Koran had been burned in the public square.  Almansor was performed only once on August 23, 1823.  A riot broke out.  It was never performed again.  For more information about the historical use of this quote, Heine's play and his context, see this article by Shlomo Avineri from The Jewish Review of Books.   I was glad that Yoko Ogawa gave me the opportunity to research this Heine quote.  It's a rebuke to book burners everywhere.

The novel that the protagonist of The Memory Police was working on seemed to be a portrayal of the island's tragedy on the scale of a single relationship.    When I looked at what is happening in Ogawa's society as an abusive relationship writ large,  I began to perceive her intent as a warning against the "Shikata ga nai" attitude. The approach of these dystopian authorities  seemed to me very much like the strategy of learned helplessness utilized by domestic abusers.  If your government is taking its cues from the kind of people who should be in prison for torturing their spouses, you know it's on the wrong path. 

The history of humanity has largely been one of tyrannical rulers who, like domestic abusers, find ways to convince the general population that they have no choice but to go along with their limited and hopeless lives.  Democracy, a system where people have choices, has been a relative blip on the historical radar.  It's here for a few centuries, but may be gone tomorrow.  When democracy is gone from the world, will we all be saying the equivalent of "Shikata ga nai"?

                        

My 2019 Retrospective

Image Courtesy of Stuart Miles

at FreeDigitalPhotos.net 

                                        
My views at the end of 2019 are 31,190 which totals to around 9,000 views during the course of the year.  So my number of views per year is increasing.  I'm happy with that.

My most viewed post was on High Flying Reviews as usual.  What was unusual about it is that it was a guest post by an author promoting her book.  The book was Wingmen by Almond Jones.  You can find that post here . I think it was so popular because it's a historical fiction novel dealing with women in aviation.  Women in aviation is a special focus of  High Flying Reviews. That was the only post I provided on that topic in 2019.  I'd love to review more books on women in the aviation field in 2020.

The most viewed post on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer was my blog tour review of  A Bookshop in Berlin by Françoise Frenkel.  This WWII memoir was originally published in 1945 in French.  The English translation for the new U.S. edition is a publishing event. I suppose that's why I suddenly got hundreds of views for this post overnight.  That's this blog's equivalent of going viral. You can find my post about Frenkel's memoir here.

That does it for statistics.  So I will now move on to my favorite reads of 2019 that have won:

                                        The Golden Mask Awards

The Best Book of the Year

Algorithms of Oppression by  Safiya Umoja Noble


This is also the Best Non-Fiction and the Best Net Galley that I read in 2019.  This book caused me to think about search and changed my search behavior.  When I read a book that I feel changed my life in some way, it's usually got a lock on best book of the year. You can find my review of Algorithms of Oppression here.

The Best Fiction of the Year

The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

This is also the Best Book Published in 2019 and the Best Science Fiction that I read in 2019.

I read more great science fiction in 2019 than I have for some time.  There is more science fiction on  my top ten for 2019 than any other genre.  I've been finding more original science fiction dealing with the themes that interest me.

The Future of Another Timeline deals with a time war for women's rights.  There is no other book  in 2019 that I found more inspiring. 

The Best Fantasy of the Year

Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This is a quest fantasy taking place in the 1920's replete with Mayan deities and mythology.   I didn't expect to love it, but it completely won me over.  See my review  here.

The Best Mystery of the Year

Bones of the Earth by Eliot Pattison

My favorite mysteries are usually historical, but Eliot Pattison has been writing a series dealing with a Chinese detective taking place in contemporary Tibet that at its best has moved and intrigued me.  This is the last book in the series,  and I found it very satisfying.  See my review here.

The Best Thriller of the Year

The Shotgun Lawyer by Victor Methos

Before 2019 I had never heard of the legal thriller author Victor Methos, and I might have gone on that way if his novel, The Shotgun Lawyer,  hadn't been a book of the month at the face to face mystery/thriller book club that I attend.   A lawsuit against a gun manufacturer certainly caused me to sit up and take notice.  I also found the characterization honest and refreshing.   See my review here.

The Best Historical Fiction of the Year

The Ventriloquists by Evan Roxanna Ramzipoor

Of course you've read tons of WWII historical fiction.  So have I, but I haven't previously seen a book about Resistance journalists who decided to put out a satire of a Nazi controlled newspaper.  It's even more amazing that this actually happened.  The Ventriloquists will give you respect for the courage of dedicated journalists. See my review here.

The Best Contemporary Fiction of the Year

Larger Than Life by Jodi Picoult

I don't read very much contemporary fiction, but Jodi Picoult is an occasional exception.  I'm more likely to love a novel that deals with humans who are devoted to wild animals.  In Lone Wolf  Picoult asked us to consider the impact of having lived with wolves on human family members.  So when I saw that Larger Than Life had been offered to Prime members for free, I was drawn to this novella about a woman who was deeply committed to the survival of African elephants.  It was one of the last books I read in 2019.  I don't always blog about the books I read, but my post about Larger Than Life will definitely appear in January.  There's lots of bloggy type substance in this novella. I also look forward to the novel dealing with the daughter of Larger Than Life's protagonist, Leaving Time.

Best Graphic Book of the Year

They Called Us Enemy by George Takei was the only book on the final ballot of the Goodreads Choice Awards that I loved enough to vote for. Takei's book certainly deserved to win.  I had also nominated it in the category of memoirs and autobiographies, but it never made the ballot.  Yet I can tell you here that They Called Us Enemy also won a Golden Mask Award for Best Memoir of 2019.  Shealea, one of my favorite bloggers, complained about how few authors of color are nominated for Goodreads Choice Awards.  Goodreads should consider improving the diversity of candidates in the future, and you might want to consider reading my review of  this graphic memoir here.

Best Indie Book of the Year

Sands of Eppla by Janeal Falor

I've been awarding best indie to books that many people wouldn't truly consider indies.   This award should definitely go to quality books that are at a disadvantage when it comes to distribution.  I acknowledge that.  This year I found an unusual epic fantasy by an indie author whose protagonist is blind and an extraordinary heroine. I reviewed Sands of Eppla for Story Origin, one of a number of websites that tries to promote indies.  I also reviewed it on this blog here.  I would like to emphasize that although Falor has created a society where status is based on a type of romantic relationship, it is not a romance novel.

Best Translation of the Year

The Memory Police  by Yoko Ogawa

 I consider The Memory Police the most horrific book I've ever read and I emphatically DON'T WANT TO READ HORROR!!  So what is it doing on this list of Golden Mask Award winners? Well, it's complicated.  The simple explanation is that it's more than a horrifying book.  Since I read Ogawa's nightmarish novel near the end of the year, my review will appear in January.  I'll be dealing with my complex reaction to The Memory Police at length on this blog.

The Memory Police is, in my view, a science fiction dystopia.  Yet it certainly wasn't my favorite science fiction novel of the year.  I support Hopepunk which  is the most recent term for the purveyors of optimism in genre fiction.

That's why I decided to give this book a Best Translation award. Translation of a book is an attempt at bridging cultures, and I'm all in favor of that. I think that translation is significant enough to be recognized as a category in a list of this sort.  I've been seeing lists of best translations elsewhere, and members of the Read Women book club on Goodreads are challenging themselves to read more translations of books by women.  I do think that the translation of  The Memory Police is very effective and well-written.  So it does deserve this award.

 Except for Eliot Pattison and Jodi Picoult,  the authors of my other favorites are new to me and were great discoveries for the year 2019.