Disney's Twisted Tales: As Old As Time

I FINALLY finished this book. It came out almost three years ago! I have picked it up, put it down, and restarted it at least three times since then. But I just bought the last one, twisted Snow White, for a low price, so I'm determined to finally catch up on all of these, before the next one comes out on October 1st. Or at least make a concerted effort to get through them. I have three more to do after all.

So for those unfamiliar with twisted tales, the author plays with a concept relating to the Disney movie we all know, and then skews it darker. Both the Aladdin and Sleeping Beauty volumes were quite dark, and this one continues that tradition.

The beginning goes back and forth between past and present, relating the story of how Maurice, Belle's father, and Rosalind, the Enchantress, meet and fall in love. You meet their friends Levi, Alaric and Frederic, all important to the story. In the present, Belle is dealing with Gaston's assholishness and going through what we know from the movie: exchanging herself for her father as prisoner of the Beast.

The past story turns darker as the supernatural people like Rosalind are hunted down or flee the country. The king and queen have turned against them and are harsh, cruel, prejudiced people. The king and queen who are Beast's parents.

I don't want to spoil too much, but you can guess what Rosalind does, and then the story switches entirely to the present, where Belle accidentally destroys the rose, then works with Beast to unravel the mystery of their past. The end is a huge confrontation and the final ending is tentatively happy, not full-on happy, but with a promise of happiness. It's good and I'm glad I finally finished it!

The Anomaly

I picked this up at Goodwill and it was one of my better finds.

This is going to be a short review, because I can't delve deep into this without giving away spoilers.

Nolan Moore is a Youtube armchair archaeologist. He does a show called The Anomaly Files, which is really more of a conspiracy theory, History Channel-type of thing. He has no formal training in anything archaeological. He's an ex-screenwriter.

He and his team are in the Grand Canyon, searching for a mysterious cavern that was discovered in 1909 and then never properly covered. The odd findings reported put it on Nolan's radar.

Nolan is the POV character and he's very likeable. He's a definitely flawed person, but the good thing is that he's also extraordinarily self-aware.

Then we've got Ken, the jaded British alcoholic who's in charge of the whole thing; Molly, his no-nonsense right hand; Pierre, the young, handsome, a little too perfect cameraman; Feather, a New-Agey liaison from their newest funding source; and Gemma, a web journalist who seems more determined that they fail than succeed.

I don't think it's a spoiler to say they find the cavern. And they get trapped in it. From there, rolls out a quite interesting sequence of events that I haven't seen done before or if I did, I sure don't remember it. I really enjoyed this from start to finish. It is a bit of a slow starter, but it's worth it. The end is just action after action and completely makes up for any slow build.

The second book in the series came out this year and I plan to order it Friday.

If you like Preston & Child stuff, try this out. It's a faster, simpler read, but it's still good. The author is a screenwriter and you can tell, but not in a bad way. This thing just screams "make me a movie."

24 Hours in Ancient Athens

Ah, I do love this series.

This most recent installment was written by the same author as the Roman volume, so it's well-written and very informative.

I think I enjoyed this one the least of the three. I'm not even sure why. The Egyptian one I liked, because of the subject matter and despite the terrible editing issues. The Roman one I enjoyed a lot. I enjoyed this, too, just...less so. Honestly, I can't even really say why.

Maybe it felt like the author was trying to cram too many historical people into a single day of life. It felt like constant name-dropping rather than an actual look at daily life. The chapters are nicely intertwined like the past books. You'll see the same people pop up a lot, especially Alcibiades. I swear he's mentioned or actually present in every other chapter.

The best thing is how many of the scenes are taken from actual ancient sources. It feels well-researched and well-written for what it is. I think I just would have preferred a few less big names and more regular people.

Adventurers, Inc. 2

Ah, another dramatic adventure. Of course.

This time Susette is in the POV position and the girls are at the Grand Canyon. They're doing some rafting on the rapids and Susette is worried because she had a bad childhood experience with swimming and is scared of the water.

Once again, we remove the main adult character who SHOULD be there: John, their teacher. He's not going rafting with them because he's too busy visiting an old girlfriend.

The girls should be in capable hands though, because chaperone Debbie's ex-boyfriend is a guide for the river rafting people. So yeah, they should be safe with him.

Except after rock-climbing up for lunch, he and Debbie stupidly let all the girls and their young trail guide Tommy rapel back down first. I don't think this is something that a responsible guide would actually do. The second adult should have gone down first, then the kids, then the last adult.

So when Debbie goes to rapel down, the rope breaks and she's dramatically saved by Jim (her ex). Oh, I should mention that while the girls are having lunch at the top of the cliff, Jim bellows at Rosina for stepping on the rope because it wears it down. Dude, don't yell at kids if your dumb ass didn't TELL them not to do it and why.

Now we've got Debbie and Jim at the top of the cliff and the five kids down below. Tommy gets them back in the raft and they go for help, but there's a spontaneous waterfall. They tried to explain how this happened, but I didn't buy it.

After surviving the waterfall, Toni, Allison and Rosina make it to shore with the raft, while Susette gets caught in a whirlpool. She's rescued by Tommy, but then they have to make their way back to the others, which terrifies her. He gives her and pep talk and they do it, mostly because he's hurt his wrist and needs her help.

They get back to the top and go to Tommy's nearby home for help and everything is fine. Susette feels braver and understands that you can't be brave without being afraid.

There's also the romantic subplot, of course. Tommy and Susette end up a cute little couple. As you can probably tell from the cover, Tommy is half-Native American, which is awesome. So few Native American characters in this type of series. And there's a stupid other plot where the girls think Debbie is going to leave the trip and stay with Jim because she's mad at John, so they spend most of the book badmouthing Debbie to Jim and Jim to Debbie only to get caught at it. And then they see John and Debbie kissing with literally zero build-up to that.

I like Susette as a character and I like Tommy a lot, too. Toni's way more obnoxious this time and she's definitely turned into a Kristy. She's also suddenly not afraid of heights at all anymore, which I find unbelievable. Allison was just kind of there, and I continue to relate to Rosina, who is not at all outdoorsy.

Next up, it's Rosina's turn in the spotlight for a sailing trip around Maine.

Adventurers, Inc. 1

I pulled Adventurers, Inc. out of my book storage and decided to give them a reread/review. This series was published in 1994-1995 and lasted for 8 volumes. There were more planned. #9 was Toni Francis, Princess for a Day, set on the French Riviera and involving a kidnapping. #10 was Suzette's Victory Ride, set in Ireland.
And #11 was Rosina's Moroccan Caper. I really wanted to read that last one! I actually got in touch with the author years ago and she informed me that sadly, they were never published.

Anyway. The series has six main characters. The premise is that the four girls won an essay contest and get to spend the summer travelling around the world. In charge is their young teacher, John, and Debbie, who is older sister to one of the girls. Toni is the Kristy of the group. She's short, outspoken and gets them into trouble twice in the first book. Debbie is her older sister. Allison is her best friend. She's the only girl in a family of five kids. She's into cars and mechanical stuff, which is cool because she's a girl, but also because she's black, and you don't see a lot of black female characters trying to fix their own jalopy. Rosina is half-Spanish and half-French and she's the wealthy fashionista type. And Suzette comes from a Japanese family. She's more sheltered and very close with her grandfather, but she also does some pretty brave stuff in the book.

Their first adventure has them going from California to Vancouver. They sightsee a bit, then go camping, which some of the girls aren't thrilled about. I'd totally be like that. Like Rosina, I mean. If I  won a trip around the world and we started out with friggin' camping, I'd be pissed.

Naturally, it turns into a crazy adventure when they meet Paul and his grandfather, who are searching for a lost family mine, and the girls go off alone in the woods with Paul. Toni and Paul decide to search for the mine, he falls down into a shaft and breaks his ankle, and Toni and Suzette set back out across mountains (yes, really) to get back to the camp. A storm causes a crevice to form, which sends Suzette back to the mine, while Toni continues forward. She makes it back to camp and then they can't get a rescue helicopter right away, so despite her fear of heights, she skydives into the valley near the mine with a ranger. That's what's on the cover, even though they look a mite too happy considering.

Is it realistic? Absolutely not. Like a teacher would let four teenage girls go off by themselves in the goddamn woods. Is it fun? Sure. I love books about travelling, so I'm all in.

Next up: Rafting down the Grand Canyon. A cute Native American boy. Suzette's scared of water, yet has to perform a daring rescue. Are we setting up a pattern? Maybe. Maybe. 

Sleepaway Girls

I got the urge to step away from my historical, horror and fantasy reads and delve back into the world of teen girls having fun. So I dug out the Jen Calonita books I hadn't gotten around to yet.

Sleepaway Girls was okay. The main character, Sam, is your typical can't-say-no type. She does whatever her best friend wants, but in a burst of independence, she decides to be a CIT at a camp for the summer instead of being third wheel to BFF and BFF's BF.

Sam has never done the camp thing before, but she seems to adjust mostly quickly. Although she harbors a ridiculous fear of wolves for the entire book.

She gets off on the wrong foot with the camp princess, who just so happens to be the owner's younger daughter. His older daughter is more like the camp queen, but she's nice.

So the book has Sam struggling with doing too many things for others, liking the hot boy who turns out to be a player and then realizing she's liked the nice (and also hot) boy who's been good to her all along, making friends, making enemies, and dealing with some insane drama.

The war between Sam and Ashley (the bratty princess) culminates in a food fight in the mess hall. The two are taken to the camp office where they're bitched at, but the staff keeps mentioning that they knew about this rivalry...and didn't do a fucking thing about it. The things Ashley does are very hurtful and she never gets any sort of proper comeuppance. You get the reasons why she did what she did, but she shows no remorse or even realization that she was a horrible, abusive bully.

The secondary cast was more enjoyable than the main and her rival. There's the boy crazy black girl who's secretly very artistic, the romance novel-obsessed more shy girl that finally gets herself some actual romance, and the sporty, driven, total Type A girl. Their characters are fun, but also could have been fleshed out a lot better than they were.

I wouldn't recommend this. Calonita's written better books. (Like the Belles trilogy, which I need to finish.) But it's a fun little romp that's a quick read and it did the trick.

Next up, I'm going back to the mid-90s for one of those BSC-inspired girl series: Adventurers Inc. Not that it's about babysitting, but it's a series of thin volumes with an ensemble cast of teen girls.

GIRLS SURVIVE Series Part 2

Finally back with another review! I wish I was more consistent with these, but alas.

The Girls Survive series just released another four books. These actually came out a couple weeks before they were originally supposed to, so that was a pleasant surprise.

I'm going in chronological order again, so we're starting with the book set during the Civil War. This was written by the same author that did Ann and Noelle's books from the first batch of four.

Our main character is a 12-year-old free black girl named Charlotte who works for Elizabeth Van Lew, who was a real person. Miss Van Lew freed all her father's slaves upon his death and even tracked down their families and freed them, too. Fictional Charlotte is one of those she found and freed. Charlotte came to live with Miss Van Lew and work for her, along with Charlotte's older cousin Mary, who is also based on a real person.

The story is set in Richmond in 1864 and quickly jumps into the action with Charlotte learning Miss Van Lew and a lot of her friends are spies. Or "patriots," as Miss Van Lew insists. The story, like all of these books, is very fast-paced because the books are so short, so Charlotte starts off her own spy career the very next day after she discovers that little secret. Her adventures culminate in her risking everything to see her cousin Mary for a few moments, which thankfully turns out advantageous when it could easily have gotten everyone involved killed. The book ends on an open, but hopeful note.

I like this one the best of this author's three. I liked all the characters and it was cool to learn that so many of them were based on real historical figures.

I've gotta be honest, I didn't know how well I was going to do with Carrie's book. For those that didn't know, I'm a Hurricane Michael survivor. Not that things were that devastating, because I don't believe anything compares with the Galveston hurricane's level of loss of life, but still. It's still fresh.

It's 1900. Twelve-year-old Carrie's a bit of a flighty character. She seems on the shallow side, being really into clothing and hairstyles and she's obsessed with her best friend's older sister to the point of almost insulting said best friend. She was supposed to go to her best friend's house for a sleepover on the day of the hurricane, but Carrie's shallowness is eclipsed only by her mother's social-climbing, so Carrie's stuck at home babysitting her younger brother.

And then it's all boom, hurricane action. The water's rising. Let's go upstairs! The roof is caving in. Let's throw a chunk of it out the window and use it as a raft! Carrie does some pretty epic heroics. I'm not sure I really buy her being able to lift a chunk of roof big enough to float her and her brother on out a broken window. It's not like the water level was that high and she just directed it out the window while it was floating, which seems more believable. Then she does a daring rescue and she, her brother and the boy she saved wait out the hurricane on their roof raft, because Carrie managed to wedge it up against a couple trees.

When the storm is over, they make their way through the devastation and Carrie finds her mother, who says her father is also okay. He's helping with the rescue efforts. Carrie also runs into her teacher, who breaks the news that both Carrie's best friend and her beloved older sister are dead. Their entire family is dead. And Carrie freaks out because not only has she just learned she lost people, but she also knows she was almost dead, too, if she'd gone to the sleepover as planned.

The book ends on a hopeful note, as Carrie refuses to leave Galveston and says they should stay and rebuild because this is their home. William, the boy she rescued, lost most of his family, except his father and their dog, but he's staying as well.

Now to paraphrase Ann M. Martin for a second, what I didn't tell you was that Carrie was white and William was black. Remember the first four books that had prejudice shoved into each one? Some historical stories are meant for that. The Civil War. Pearl Harbor. Internment camps. Anything involving how Native Americans were treated. The Titanic one wasn't. This one isn't really either. The author explains that she liked the real life accounts she read of people helping each other regardless of their race during the Galveston hurricane, because Galveston was segregated. That's all well and good, but work it into the story naturally. There are a couple very heavy-handed mentions of Galveston being segregated and Carrie just treats it as the way it is rather than having any sort of emotion about it. It feels mechanical. Forced. Shallow. I like the character of William, but that whole angle could have been handled much better.

Next up: Triangle Shirtwaist fire. From a slightly triggering hurricane story to one of my worst fears: being stuck in something on fire that I can't get out of. Yay.

So Lucia, or Lucy as she prefers, is a 14-year-old Italian immigrant. She wants to go to college and be an astronomer, but her father says no. He was injured at his job, so their only income right now is from Lucy and her brother's jobs, plus laundry their mother takes in, and boarders that share the only bed in the house.

Lucy works at Triangle, along with her friend Rosie, who's a Russian Jew. Rosie and Lucy's brother Tony have mutual crushes but can't hope to be together due to their religious backgrounds. That's the snippet of prejudice tossed into this book. Also working at Triangle are Lucy's cousin Cara, Cara's fiance Frank, an Italian boy named Michael that has a crush on Lucy, and a girl from Michael's hometown named Marcella that likes Michael and naturally then hates Lucy.

All these characters are established over the course of the first four chapters, as well as unions and poor conditions at the factories.

Then we get right into the fire and it's all action until the end. It's all panic. Michael finds Lucy, but ends up having to save Marcella. Lucy tries to find Rosie multiple times and does catch a glimpse of her once, but can't get to her. Lucy finally ends up on the building's roof and is one of the few that were on the ninth floor that managed to escape. Lucy actually worked on the eighth floor, but went to nine to look for Rosie.

Lucy finds Marcella in the aftermath. Marcella tells her Michael didn't make it and neither did Rosie, who was on the fire escape that collapsed. Cara's fiance Frank didn't make it either.

This one was mostly well-written and I thought it captured a lot of the tension well, after establishing the characters and their world.

Only one moment I thought was a poor choice. Lucy's cousin Cara is sick and can't go to work, so she gives Lucy a note for Frank. Lucy's caught up in some drama with Michael over lunch and forgets to take the note to Frank. At the end, Cara is comforted by the fact that Lucy gave Frank her note and he knew how she felt at the end. Eeyeah, except he didn't get it, because Lucy was being a forgetful idiot. Not that Lucy tells her. She lies her ass off. This whole situation was unnecessary and puts Lucy in a bad light for absolutely no reason.

Other than that though, this one was good.

And now the Holocaust book. Technically, Kristallnacht. I always struggle through Holocaust books. They're painful to read. I've been to Dachau. It's something you never forget. But in the light of some things going on in this country today, things like this are even harder to read.

I'm going to be brief because this was indeed a struggle to read. It was good, but difficult. You know the ending, while seemingly hopeful, is ultimately going to be sad, though you'll never know for sure.

I love that these books are always in groups of four. The next set, due out in February, will be about a Cherokee girl on the Trail of Tears, a black girl on the Oregon Trail, one living through the 1918 flu epidemic, and a Chinese-American girl during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.