Angelfall by Susan Ee--a review

In a post-apocalyptic world, a human joins forces with an angel to rescue her little sister as a resistance movement launches its first mission against the supernatural creatures.

Definitely in the dystopian tradition of Hunger Games, this story of a world in which paranormal creatures rule the night has a fine, feisty heroine, an intriguing anti-hero angel without wings and a quest. It’s well-written but derivative (especially for readers of the genre in general and Hunger Games in particular).

PENRYN YOUNG is 17 and basically in charge of her family—her mentally ill mother and her disabled sister PAIGE—in the wake of world-wide apocalypse involving angel attacks. Everyone on earth saw GABRIEL, the Messenger of God, killed in Jerusalem and since then, angels have hunted and killed humans for their own uses.

            Penryn is uniquely suited to protect her family since her paranoid mother signed her up for a series of self-defense classes. That’s good because her mother is off her meds and unpredictable and her sister is useless. The family has been hiding out on the top floor of an apartment building, but the bands of roving gangs have been scavenging closer and closer for days. Penryn realizes it’s time to move and despite her mother’s terror of the night (when the streets are empty of humans but filled with all kinds of predators), she wants to move at night. With her mother pushing a shopping cart and Penryn pushing her baby sister in a wheelchair, the trio sets out.

A Vampire a Day: Blood Thirst by Richard Matheson

I first encountered Richard Matheson as a writer on Twilight Zone. He wrote some of the most memorable episodes, including the Richard Donner-directed, William Shatner starrer "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet." He also rwote the classic novel I Am Legend.This is a compilation of vampire fiction from the last century that's available in both paper and hard cover. If you want to buy it new, it'll cost you around $15, but Amazon's sellers have it for a penny and postage, which is probably my favorite way to buy books. The book was written in 1997, so it predated a lot of influential vampire storeis, from Twilight to True Blood, but this is definitely a book I need in my library.

When someone gushes over a book

I was wearing the earrings I bought in New Orleans today and the checker at my supermarket complimented me on them. I told her I'd bought them in NOLA and she told me she'd loved the city. I told her about a cab driver taking me by Anne Rice's house and she told me how much she loved Anne Rice's books. And that made me think of the time I was in a supermarket in L.A. looking over the new paperback books. An older woman, a total stranger, pointed out a book by James Patterson--The 9th Judgment, a book in the Woman's Murder Club series. "That's a really good book," she said.

How cool is that? Can you imagine how great it would be to have total strangers recommending your book to people? You cannot buy that kind of word of mouth. When the first of the Twilight books came out, they came highly recommended to me by a friend's daughter, who was in middle school at the time. She's now in college, a writer herself, and I still rely on her for opinions in all things YA and paranormal. Forget being a best-selling author. What I want to be is an author that people recommend to strangers. (Well, don't forget it but you know what I mean.)

Judging a book by its cover--Bigstock and me

You know you've been spending too much time on the various photo stock sites when you're sent a book to review and your first thought is not, "This looks like an intriguing book" but, "I have that exact photo myself!" This happened to me recently and it got me to thinking about covers in general. I can't remember where I saw it but about a year ago a site was posting photos of traditionally published covers side by side to show that art directors at the Big Six were using the same images over and over. There were two in particular--one a shot of a snowy landscape leading to a manor house and one a portion of a woman's body in some vaguely medieval/Renaissance period dress. (The infamous partial torso images have come in for a lot of heckling.)

Everyone agrees that readers DO judge a book by its cover, but what makes for a great cover?  I like clean lines and great fonts. I spend a lot of time on Pinterest, and many people have "book covers" boards, which are great sources of inspiration if you are creating your own covers for books. The two most striking covers I can think of are the covers for Twilight and Memoirs of a Geisha. Both were incredibly simple and both were memorable. the thing is, the stunning Memoirs of a Geisha cover wasn't the first cover used. the original cover was the one seen to the left. It's elegant and beautiful but it isn't sexy, not in the way the updated cover was.

The book sold a lot of copies and was adapted into a movie, but it would be really interesting to know how many copies of the book sold with the old cover versus the new. Look at the covers together. Which one would you rather read?

Freebie sample--Romeo and Juliet, a werewolf, vampire love story

Romeo and Juliet--a vampire/werewolf love story by H.T. Night is now available on Amazon for $2.99, but there's a generous free sample. I'm interested in seeing what Night has done with this premise because I have a story in which a clueless young theater company "revamps" the classics into Twilight and Harry Potter-inspired stories.  Turning the Montagues and Capulets into werewolves and vampires seems like a no-brainer of a way to interest teens in the story, which is already the greatest story of teenage romantic angst ever.
H.T. Night is a paranormal romance writer with a degree in theater from Cal State Fullerton. He's working on several series simultaneously and put out two books last month.  Check out his website here for more information on his books.

Feminist Fiction (Film) Friday

I played hooky earlier this week and went to see The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I didn't really have the time to spare but I knew if I didn't go to see it this week, it would be gone by this week. And I was right. Marigold is not a particularly good movie. Every single plot twist in the film is telegraphed before hand. And yet...messy as it is, predictable as it is, the movie is totally enjoyable. Not the least of the pleasures is watching the actors. Judi Dench. Bill Nighy. Maggie Smith. Tom Wilkinson, Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire). It's kind of like watching an actor's master class.
Nighy and Dench have worked together before in Notes on a Scandal, and although that is a very different movie it has something in common with Marigold--it has a couple of terrific parts for women who are no longer young; who are in fact ... old. Both Maggie Smith and Judi Dench are 78. (Tom Wilkinson is 64; Nighy is not yet 63.) Both Smith and Dench have resumes that go back to the middle of the last century. Dench's first credit on IMDB is 1959; Smith's first listing is 1955.  That's 1955 people--pre-Space Age.
In Marigold, both actresses play women who have been betrayed by the people they love. They're victims who ultimately refuse to be victimized and on their own terms, find happiness. They are not glamorous women. The camera zooms in on their fragile, wrinkled skin and it's a cruel contrast to the lovely, smooth-skinned ingenue who plays Dev's girlfriend in the film. And yet, the stories the audience want to see belong to the older actresses. (Nighy and Wilkinson are terrific in their roles too, but we are talking of women here.)

A day after I saw the movie, I started seeing the stills from the next James Bond movie, Skyfall. and there was a photo of Dench as "M" looking...stunning. Judi Dench and I are the same height (5'1") and believe me when I tell you how short that is. And yet...she looks like she could face down a couple of dictators before breakfast and still have time to whip out an economics treaty. In the movies that have always defined a very particular male fantasy, she is the woman in charge. I love that.
Then there's Maggie Smith.  Her role as the Dowager Countess is the reason everyone is so addicted to Downton Abbey. She is playing a powerful woman whose power has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with intelligence and cunning.
I love that these women are still getting terrific roles. As with Helen Mirren (67) and Meryl Streep (63), they are defining what it means to be a woman of une certain age on screen They play women of substance.
Just as I was the oldest person in the audience when I went to see Twilight, I was by far the youngest person in the audience at The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I sat behind a row of women in their 80s who loved every single moment of the movie. A lot of movies coming out of Hollywood these days marginalize women, make them into sex dolls and cartoons. But there is hope. Women like movies too--even women old enough to be great-grandmothers. It's nice to see a movie that celebrates life even in the "golden years."