BOOK & BLOG

October 29, 2008

Books of the Week:

• ROWDY IN PARIS by Tim Sandlin
• BLOODRING by Faith Hunter

Tim Sandlin’s ROWDY IN PARIS is a non-genre novel, and I rarely read non-genre books. This one was worth straying from my comfort zone (which I have to say in my own defense, is a very large comfort zone).

The Rowdy of the title is a bull rider, and on the night he wins his first and only rodeo he meets two French students. After a night of sex with the two women, he finds his championship belt buckle missing. Determined to secure his winning for his son (Rowdy’s estranged from the mother in a major way), this bull rider hops on a plane to Paris with only the slimmest of clues to help him track down the two women. But find them he does. I didn’t find this book as hilarious as others did, but it was a funny read, and Rowdy himself is a great character.

BLOODRING is set in an America that’s suffered through a cataclysmic pestilence and a war between the seraphs and the mages, if I’m understanding the back story correctly. The earth is in another Ice Age, and most technology has become unusable. Thorn St. Croix has concealed herself among humans. She will be executed in a gruesome way if the fact that she is a stone mage is revealed. But her ex-husband is abducted by dark forces, and she may have to risk exposure to find him.

I haven’t finished BLOODRING yet, but I’m really enjoying the story and the characters. Hunter does a good job portraying Thorn’s constant fear of discovery and her unending readiness to flee. Thorn may be a rogue mage, but she’s formed very close ties to the humans around her, and it’s impossible not to like her and her struggle to stay close to the people she’s grown to love.

BLOG

We’re ushering our daughter through her senior year. It’s a year of goodbyes. Yesterday she played her last volleyball game. She will probably never stand on a volleyball court again in her life. It’s a shock to realize that; it’s the not the first shock of this school year, and it won’t be the last.

It was hard, at first, to put this into her perspective. We know there’s a lot of life after high school. She doesn’t, not really. She’s been fortunate enough to go through her entire school career in one school system, surrounded by people she’s known most – even all – of her life. Now she’ll have to transition into something completely alien. She’ll meet people whose experience far exceeds hers, and people whose experience is less.

We watched our sons go through their senior years with similar feelings on our part, but apparently different ones on theirs. Our oldest seemed to charge through the year without much in the way of nostalgia, while our middle son seemed to be completely ready to bust out of his life and into another one. Our daughter, though . . . she’s another case entirely.

This is another circle-of-life year.

I hate those damn circles.

--Charlaine Harris