Impossible by Nancy Werlin

Lucy Scarborough’s mother, Miranda, went mad and disappeared immediately after Lucy was born, though she’s frequently reappeared in Lucy’s life since, but never in a pleasant way. When Lucy is 17, an evil elf masquerading as a social worker who works with Lucy’s foster mother possesses Lucy’s prom date and makes him rape her. When the date is free of the possession, he’s so horrified (presumably thinking he did it because he was drunk, and not because he was possessed by an evil elf) that he commits suicide. Soon after, Lucy discovers that she’s pregnant.

Ok, all that actually seems quite tame and sensible when actually reading the book.

Anyway, Lucy is descended from the woman in the ballad “Scarborough” Fair,” who is tasked with three impossible tasks by a presumably spurned lover. Here, the spurned lover is an elf and when human woman he wanted, Fenella, rejected him and took a human lover instead, he cursed her so that all the women of her descent would get pregnant at seventeen, have a baby at eighteen, and then go insane and aimlessly wander around.

I tend to love family curses and women who break them, especially when the curses are based on myth and folklore, but this one doesn’t quite work. Werlin plays up the mother/daughter aspect by having both Miranda’s diaries and Lucy’s foster mother help her with the curse, not to mention her best friend/True Love, but the result is that Lucy herself seems rather passive about breaking the curse, which everyone is surprisingly accepting of. And while the date rape and its aftermath are handled well, though we never see much of how anyone outside of Lucy’s immediate circle reacts to “pregnant by your prom date who died ten minutes after sex,” but the book is overall dismissive of both rape and mental illness as effects of the curse, plus the whole “women can only be heroes and break curses if they’ve been raped” thing,.

And overall interesting idea and generally good, but it could have been better, and handled various aspects better. Though I should mention that, like me, my sister-in-law was captured by the beautiful cover, so I gave it to her to read when I finished it. She reads very little of this type of fiction, and loved the 140 or so pages she read before my nephews woke up from their naps.

The Deception of the Emerald Ring by Lauren Willig

This is the third of Willig’s series about spies in the Napoleonic Wars, with modern grad student Eloise Kelly researching the history of the Pink Carnation, a famous masked spy.

This time, her research takes her to Letty Alsworthy, a young woman who accidentally gets kidnapped when she accidentally interferes with her younger sister, Mary’s, plans to elope. When she’s delivered to the would-be-groom, Geoffrey Pinchingdale-Snipe, he doesn’t bother to see who’s in the carriage or even say hello, but instead starts kissing her. With her in her nightgown, in front of witnesses. So, naturally, he decides she’s an evil deceptive gold digger, marries her to avoid a scandal, then runs off to Ireland to quell a rebellion. Letty follows so she can kick him in sensitive places. I mean, to avoid the humiliation of being abandoned five minutes after her wedding. Thankfully, my two favorite characters in the series, sensible Jane and her companion, opinionated, parasol-wielding Miss Gwen, are there, and Letty soon gets caught up in spy shenanigans. As one does.

I thought the first two books were very fun, seemingly based around “what spy books need are more female spies!,” but the enjoyment here was marred by a romantic plotline in which the supposed hero goes out of his way to always assume the worst of the heroine. He gets over it eventually, but never really apologizes. I spent most of the book wishing he was gone and the book was Letty, Jane and Miss Gwen having adventures. Plus, his falling in love with Letty meant pointing out all the ways Letty was oh-so-superior to that silly Mary, making me want Mary to come to Ireland and kick people in sensible places. Letty deserved a way better romantic plotline, and Mary deserves her own book.

The modern plotline was also more trying than previous installments. I kind of lost interest in Eloise’s rather forced romance with Colin, a descendant of one of the spies, once I could no longer treat it as Eloise using Colin for a substitute for her crush on his ancestress, Amy, but I’d rather have the forced sniping than Eloise almost literally wondering why he wasn’t calling her every other sentence. Less boyfriend, more academic geekery, please.

At it’s best when focusing on not-quite-believable spy hijinks and “hmm…how can I work in more female spies?,” this is definitely the weakest of the three books I’ve read so far, but I get the impression that it’s less liked than others anyway. Sadly, I believe the next book is about a supporting character from the last two books who annoys me. Maybe he’ll be less annoying in his own book. It happens.

Island at War eps 1-6 (complete series)

Set in the Channel Islands during WWII, Island at War focuses on a fictitious island named St. Gregory’s. When France surrenders to Germany, the British troops leave the islands. Unfortunately, nobody bothers to tell the Germans that only civilians were left on the island, and it’s soon bombed, resulting in the islanders surrendering St. Gregory’s in hopes of avoiding further bloodshed.

The series has little action, and focuses primarily on the islanders learning to adjust to occupation. Some of the Nazis are portrayed sympathetically, some as monsters (one is a super creepy stalker) and some in between. The inevitable romance between a reluctant Nazi airman and an island girl plays out much better than it initially looked like it would, and early on, I thought the universe was going to implode when the initial main viewpoint characters were two women with grown children. (Various other characters, still mostly women, soon become central viewpoint characters as well, but still!)

My favorite characters, incidentally, are Zelda Kay, an awesomely pragmatic German Jew who is trapped on the island and has to hide her identity from the creepy stalker Nazi who is in love with her, and Cassie Mahy, a shopowner whose husband was killed in the bombing. She, too, is awesomely pragmatic, but with loads of venom added to it.

Unfortunately, the series was clearly intended to get a second season. While a central subplot involving a British spy who is from the island is resolved* and several other plotlines reach good stopping points, there are other plotlines left completely hanging. A good series with lots of interesting characters and plotlines, but with a frustrating lack of a real ending.

*Note: This plotline suffers from a fair bit of “The plot requires that my actions do not reflect my implied intelligence!” Like waving flashlights around on the beach after curfew.

anime: Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle: Season 1 (complete)

You know, I’m tempted to say “wow, I forgot how bad early Tsubasa was” but actually, while early Tsubasa was rather slow and often annoying, it was also often funny, often by the pure quality of Clamp’s melodrama. In contrast, the anime takes itself way too seriously (complete with Epic Serious and Tragic music), and I kept going “how did I survive the early manga?” And then there’d be Yuuko or Kurogane or snarky!angsty!(warrior king!)Touya, and I’d remember. There should be more snarky!angsty!(warrior king!)Touya in the world. I’m just saying.

The anime also has a bad habit of emphasizing some of the most irritating things about the plot, like Sakura’s earlier lack of personality (but lessening the pertinence of it) or how Syaoran’s sacrifice is for something to be taken from Sakura. Yeah, thanks, anime. I’d managed to mostly repress that until you went at it with a sledgehammer. The season also ends just after the Oto arc, and so before things actually get good and interesting. (I don’t really start more than passively enjoying the series until a couple arcs later when Sakura starts really doing things and we get the first Super Epic Angsty Origin and then the angst and gothic shoujo crack just kinda explode.) Oh, wait, we get “ZOMG! Look at One Eyed Spoiler Boy!” I am rather fond of One Eyed Spoiler Boy. *pets him*

On the flipside, this my first time going through some of these story points since falling prey to Clamp’s evil marketing ways and reading other Clamp stuff, so I appreciate a lot of the crossovers and references more. early!Mokona is also actually rather cute in the anime, instead of horribly annoying like in the manga.