I didn't quite realize how much reading I've been doing.
#45 Once Upon A Dream by Liz Braswell Another YF girl power retelling of a fairy tale. This one is about Sleeping Beauty. In this one, at least the guys weren't all schlubs. The prince does contribute materially to the successful conclusion (surely you didn't think Maleficent would win? Not in a YF novel!) and all is well by the end - mostly, anyway. These books are nice to cleanse the palate after digesting history or deep philosophy or a detailed biography, and since there's little or no rude language and no sex, they're quick reads.
#46 Tank Men by Robert Kershaw World War II revealed new and more violent ways to destroy one's enemies. The tank - an armored, self-propelled engine of death and ruin - was one of the foremost. The author delves into first-person tank combat accounts from Britain, Germany, Russia, Italy, and the U.S. Many of the British war authors I've read tend to use a lot of passive voice, which tends to distance the reader from the action. But this is still a gripping read, one I'm glad I picked up.
#47 Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis I was surprised that this book was not a Christian allegory. But Lewis often described himself as a "medievalist" in that his academic passion was in medieval times. This is a retelling the Cupid/Psyche myth from ancient Greece from a third party, Psyche's sister. It's interesting with that world, but had I known what it was I wouldn't have read it. It's not a bad story, just not my bowl of strawberry shortcake.
#48 The Bomber Mafia by Malcolm Gladwell Gladwell moves away from contemporary issues and situations in this one and delves into the men in both America and England who informed the bombing strategies to be deployed against Germany in World War II. The RAF favored night bombing against area targets, which resulted in fewer losses per mission but greatly reduced accuracy. The USAAF insisted on daylight precision bombing against strategic targets, which greatly increased losses but put more bombs on target than the RAF did per bomber per mission. But the statistical difference in the military result wasn't that dramatic, although there are German sources that report that had the U.S. bombed Schweinfurt effectively one more time, it might have knocked the German ball bearing production offline for quite some time. And high-altitude precision over Japan was useless - the B29s flew high enough to enter the jet stream, which gave them a ground speed that exceeded the limits of the Norden bombsight. The best tactic used against the Japanese was the low-level night bombing from B29s using high-temperature incendiaries. It seems the Bomber Mafia - the American true believers in high-altitude precision bombing - were wrong because the desired result exceeded the available technology.
#49 The Perfect Wife: Jessie Hunt #1 by Blake Pierce This is not the Perfect Wife reviewed a few weeks ago (I'll get to that one too). Jessie Hunt is the daughter of a deranged serial killer who left her tied to a chair, bleeding and hypothermic, for three days next to her butchered mother when she was six years old. Jessie becomes a profiler for the Los Angeles Police Department, and her first case is to solve a murder she thinks she might have committed. One of her resources is another serial killer, this one in custody, who idolized her father and patterned his murders after him. This isn't a police procedural, though - there are twists and turns and surprises throughout. And I was a little surprised at the actual killer.
#50 The Perfect Block: Jessie Hunt #2 by Blake Pierce Jessie makes a few friends and tracks down another murderer while barely dodging death herself. There's more about her father and her ex-husband and her new friends, along with more pretzel plotting. Again, I didn't pick out the killer until very late in the story, immediately before the reveal. Good stuff.
#51 The Perfect House; Jessie Hunt #3 by Blake Pierce Another Jessie Hunt novel. She tracks down killers and clues and sidesteps danger with the best of them. There are a bunch of these, plus a number of other series by the same author. I'm glad I can check these out to my Kindle, because I couldn't afford to buy them all and the local library doesn't have many of the physical volumes. Sometimes technology really is our friend.
#52 The Perfect Wife by J. P. Delany I like science fiction even when it's outside the bounds of reality (I write Superman fiction for fun - duh), so this tale of an android with the consciousness of a missing (or maybe dead) woman uploaded to it interested me. Most the novel is written in second person ("You see the door and you open it.") which jarred me a little at first, but there's a valid reason for it, which doesn't become clear until the end. There are also first person plural chapters ("We saw them come back from a date.") dropped in to give the reader more backstory than the android main character can access. I thought it interesting. Of course, the lingering theme is that if we make our machines too smart, they might decide they don't need us.
#53 Unbirthday by Liz Braswell This one shakes up the story of Alice in Wonderland by delaying Alice's return from her seventh birthday until her eighteenth. Lots of changes in the story, lots of intrigue, lots of drama and danger and of course the Jabberwock makes an appearance. Girl power with some romance mixed in.
#54 Conceal, Don't Feel by Jen Calonita Twist on Frozen. Elsa and Anna are separated as preadolescents and magically made to forget each other by the Rock Trolls, along with the entire kingdom. As a bonus, if Anna gets too close to Elsa before the spell is broken, Anna will freeze from the inside out. The bad guys and the good guys are all familiar, and Kristoff has a bigger role that I expected when I first started the story. This isn't great literature, but it's nice mental candy, easily digested and not really upsetting. I haven't read all twenty-something books in the series, but I begin to suspect that they're all girl power tales. And there's nothing wrong with that as long as the men aren't deliberately marginalized or demonized.
