Viking Warrior Rising (Sweden)

*courtesy of an Advanced Reader’s Copy from Asa Maria Bradley, my dear friend and fellow writer, who chose to launch her first novel at Auntie’s Bookstore.

by Asa Maria Bradley

You know how, when you get done with an awesome series, you feel that kind of hollowness? A longing to re-enter the fantastic world you’ve been living in for 3 or 6 or 9 or 12 books, but you can’t, because you have read the words The End…?

And then you find another writer, with a similar but unique world and style, and you are sooooooooooooooooo excited?

If you love the paranormal romances of Christine Feehan and J.R.Ward, Asa’s Vikings and Valkyries series is your next find. And what a fun find it is!

Love in the Snow = Steaming

Malmo, Asa’s home town

While I love the “Dark Warrior” series by Feehan, it drives me crazy that she can’t seem to grasp the ethnicity of Carpathian names. And while I love J.R. Ward’s “Black Daggerhood” series, I have to admit they are a bit “rape-y.”

Well, Asa’s series doesn’t have either of those flaws. Asa is Swedish herself, so she grew up with the legends of the Vikings and Valkyries, and tales of Ragnarok. She’s authentic as it gets, and she doesn’t make careless mistakes. (She once objected to a description of a scene in a Russian café by informing our friend John that there was no way, given the number of matchsticks he had used, to make the shape he had mentioned.) And, she is a strong woman, and dare I say, a feminist.

The only comparable writer I can think of, as far as having strong female heroines, is new writer Joanna Brodsky, whose main character is a non-human Greek goddess fallen from grace, who patrols Manhattan. (Check out her book The Immortals, just published January 2016 .)

Now, back to the Norse. Asa’s background as a physics teacher lends her unique blend of science and magic a compelling, and believable twist.

The Plot

Naya is a fierce computer expert whose upbringing was a bit different…and involved a laboratory. A lab and a government from whom she is still trying to rescue her brother, Scott.

One night, while heading to her car, she sees a large man getting his butt kicked in an alley by some little rat-faced creatures and against her better judgment, and her habit, she steps in to help.

As it turns out, the man is Leif, the leader of a band of warrior Vikings and Valkyries, sent to Earth by Odin to foil the plans of Loki to bring about Ragnarok. Oh, and it seems she is Leif’s intended mate–by kissing her, an ancient Norse bond and prophecy is triggered. If they don’t complete it, Leif will lose himself permanently to battle fury and become a berserker. So time is running out for them, and for Earth as well.

But in the meantime, there are still are feuds over sandwiches, chauvinism, campy dialogue and misunderstandings aplenty. Also a motorcycle chase. This is not a super-serious, dark novel. It is a light-hearted, sexy and fun read.

Final Rating

I can’t wait to read the next novel in the series! Yes, Asa is my friend, but even if I didn’t know her from Freya, I would still love this book.

Island of the Colorblind (Guam)

by Oliver Sacks

Courtesy of a special order from Auntie’s Bookstore

A famous neurologist (Sacks) , a Norwegian colorblind man (Knut), and a scientist named Bob go into a sakua bar. They drink the slimy, grey, pulpy liquid and feel really peaceful and stare at the stars all night. Some see colors, one sees only luminescence.

Actually the title of this book is a misnomer (at least for my blog) because the colorblind bits take place on Pohnpei and Pingelap in the Federated States of Micronesia. What the Chamorro people of Guam and Rota (and Saipan and a single place in Japan) suffer from, in great numbers, is a mysterious and fearful illness called lytico-bodig. It presents in a number of ways: like Alzheimer’s, like Parkinson’s, like Lou Gerig’s Disease (ALS) and/or like the post-encephalitic illness many of Sacks’ patients suffered from in the movie Awakenings. (Westerners call it ALS-PDC.)

Cycads

There are a bunch of theories as to why the Chamorro people suffer the disease in such high numbers–one theory is that it is somehow related to their use of a particular seed from the jungle. From the cycad tree–an ancient the dinosaurs may have munched on–it’s poisonous until the seeds are thoroughly soaked. Hm. Ancient neurotoxins? Bring it on!

What I Loved About This Book

This book is a botanist’s dream: full of not only beautiful descriptions of the mysterious jungles on the islands of Guam, Rota, and others, but with lovely  hand-sketches as well.

The search for disease origins fascinated me, as well as the descriptions of the people and families living with the disease. The relief on Tomasa’s face; the satisfaction in her eyes when Doctor John says that her daughter is in no danger of getting the lytico-bodig: nobody in the younger generation is getting it, thank God. They don’t know why, but it is enough.

And What I Didn’t

Even more than some tropical islands, Guam has had a rough colonial history, having been the property of Germany, Spain, Japan, and now America. And I was totally indignant, as was the author, when he and his Chamorro colleague Phil were harassed when wanting to enter the U.S. military base to swim at the best beach on the island, now off-limits to most. The site where the most beautiful and oldest village in Guam was destroyed by American and Japanese fighting in WWII. With the graveyard of the Chamorro people’s relatives and ancestors, and they get hassled every time they want to go pay their respects. On their own land, where they have lived since 200 B.C.

Sometimes I’m so proud of my country I just can’t stand it. Sigh.

Oh, and get this: Many of the power outages on Guam are really snake-outs. Brown tree-climbing snakes get up to the top of power poles and fry themselves, causing a power outage. Courtesy of a U.S. Navy ship during WWII. (I have to wonder, since humans are so good at making species go extinct, why we couldn’t have managed that here.) There are no native birds on Guam anymore–no birds at all, in fact, thanks to these non-indigenous snakes. Ugh.

Caveat: I would have preferred that the meaty 100 pages of endnotes had been footnotes instead, so I could have enjoy them as I was going along.

Nonetheless–a fabulous read, part travelogue, part medical mystery, part history, a little bit of comedy thrown in. Really different from Sacks’ other books.

The Good Muslim (Bangladesh)

by Tahmima Anam

Courtesy of a special order from Auntie’s Bookstore

Wow. A great look at the complex lives of an ordinary single-parent family in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Rich with the sounds, scents and sights of life in Bengal.

Maya and her brother were freedom fighters in the war for Bangladeshi independence in the early 1970s. Now, they must try to put their lives back together. When Maya’s brother takes a right turn into extreme Islam, she refuses to accept it, and tries to rescue her brother’s son, Zaid, from the extremist lifestyle.

She wants her brother to feed him better, look after the scabs on his skin, see that he’s washed and learns not to cheat at cards or steal money from people’s purses, not to lie, and most of all, to send him to school.

But control isn’t love, as Maya soon finds out. Although she herself is partially seduced by the simple faith of the “people upstairs”, she despises their ignorance in turning their backs on Western ideals, Western furniture, books, and light sockets. She refuses to see anything good in her brother’s faith, or to acknowledge how important it is to Sohail.

Can We Read It? Yes, We Can

The style of writing is easy –no purple prose here, just good storytelling that pulls you right through the plot even when what you’re reading is horrific. Like all the Bangladeshi women who were raped by Pakistani soldiers and now can’t return home to their families. (Many elect to fly to Pakistan, to leave their “shame” behind them.) Like the village woman who is given 101 lashes by a group of village men when she has a Down’s Syndrome baby (the husband accuses her of cheating, since the baby looks like a “Chink”.)

Fort in Dhaka

In these days of Islamaphobia, it is refreshing to be in the head of Maya’s brother Sohail, who finds a peace in Islam that has eluded him ever since the terrible war. And the terrible thing he did. To feel the soothing kindness of Sister Khadija. But to also feel, through Maya’s eyes, the blind selfishness of Sohail, who sacrifices his son’s needs before his own. Who sends his son back to the madrasa out of arrogance and selfish uncaring, when his son has already told him what is happening there.

The resolution of the novel, after a tragedy, is perfect and left me appreciating one of those “ah ha” moments that happen in life all too rarely. If this were just a novel of clashing faiths, changing culture, and warring countries, it would have been ok. But because the author focused on the family element, the love and hate and control and disgust and expectation and exasperation and tolerance and joy and the whole juicy, hairy, complicated mango, it was great.

Five spicy samosas with lots of chilis!