The Court Dancer

The Court Dancer is the story of Yi Jin who spent her childhood in the Korean  royal palace in the mid 1800s. She worked both in the royal embroidery studio and as a court dancer from the age of 6 until the age of 23. When the French legate to Korea, Victor Collin de Plancy, announced that he had been ordered back to France, the King gave him Yi Jin as a gift, one that he could take back to France as a wife.

The story opens with Yi Jin and Victor at the harbor boarding the ship that will take them to France.  It then returns back to Jin as a child and tells how she came to the palace, learned her embroidery and dance skills, and her friendships with best friends Soa and Yeon and a friendship with a French missionary.  When Victor meets her he falls madly in love with her. Jin falls in love with his library. The story forwards again to Jin in Paris where she is always the center of attraction due to her asian looks. She continues with her love of books by translating Korean books into French. However, she ultimately has too many adjustment problems and Victor takes her back to Korea. 

This is a slow moving story. While the author has painted rich details of Korean royal court life, I feel that it could have been written in fewer pages. It seemed to me that it would take 4 or 5 pages to tell what could have been told in one page. I quickly got bored with the book, then action occurred and I got interested again, and then bored again. This repeated for me throughout the book.

I was somewhat disappointed with the book. While I looked forward to what would happen next, the story moved too slow for me. Interest in the plot kept me reading though.

3 out of 5 stars!

The Masterpiece

The Masterpiece alternates chapters between the late 1920s and the mid 1970s.  In the 1920s illustrator Clara Darden arrives in New York City from Arizona as an art student at the Grand Central School of the Art located in New York City's Grand Central Terminal.  She is a promising student and is quickly promoted to class monitor. When a teacher fails to show up for the second semester, Clara is given the class to teach.  While she teaches, she prepares her illustrations for a faculty show as well as for presentation to magazines such as Vogue.  At the school she meets and befriends fellow teacher Levon Zakarian. Levon becomes both her mentor and her downfall.  

Meanwhile, in 1974 Virginia Clay tries to obtain a job as legal secretary with no experience but is fired after the first day.  She is fresh off a divorce from a corporate attorney and thought that she had picked up enough information from listening to his conversations over the two decades that they were married to be able to do the job.  Her temp agency places her in the information booth at Grand Central Terminal tidying up, getting coffee for the others and refilling the stacks of timetables as needed.  While trying to find the bathroom on her first day on the job Virginia stumbles upon the Grand Central School of the Art which had closed during World War II and never reopened.  The space was never rented again and she was able to enter and look at some of the artwork that was left over from the students.

The Grand Central Terminal is the center of a big lawsuit to determine whether is should receive landmark status or be demolished and replaced with a high-rise building.  Virginia becomes enamored with the Terminal as she begins to see what the building was like when it was built. She also returns to the art school and sees an unsigned illustration that she likes and takes it.  Virginia then begins a quest to find out who the artist is. 

I loved this novel!  In fact, I read it in one sitting.  The pace was fast and the characters, all of them, were captivating, especially Clara Darden.  You could not help but feel emotion for a woman who left her family as a teenager, traveled across the entire country by herself, and entered art school as a serious student.  Most female students were looking for husbands but Clara wanted to be a working artist and an illustrator specifically.  Illustration was not considered art at the time. It was considered commercial.  She runs into strong male characters and holds her own.  Her boss at the school, Mr. Lorette, wanted to fire her as a teacher after the first semester and hid her illustrations at the faculty show because he disapproved of illustration as art. He did his best to quash her attempts to be a working artist. Levon Zakarian was both a competitor and a lover but Clara was able to understand him well enough to maneuver his movements.  

Virginia Clay was another strong woman and one that I was familiar with in the 1970s.  Divorce was just beginning to be common at the time and many new divorcees had no education or training for a job. These women had to take whatever job they could find and support their children on whatever amount of money they made. These women always made ends meet.  I don't know how they did it because it does not always happen to these women in the twenty first century. 

There is much to learn here about illustration as an art form.  You see it when it was popular in magazines and in advertisements before photography was used.  It was replaced by photography and had a renaissance in later decades but that history was not part of the book.  In the book almost all of the  working illustrators were men.  Women just were not given opportunities for this type of work. Clara Darden was an exception. I enjoyed reading about this part of art history. 

The Masterpiece was an entertaining  historical mystery novel and I rate it 5 out of 5 stars!

Deadly Cure

Deadly Cure is the first book by Lawrence Goldstone that I have read. It is both a historical mystery and a medical mystery novel.  It takes place in 1893 in New York City.

Physician Noah Whitestone is called to a rich neighbor's home to urgently care for their 5 year old son, Willard Anschutz, as his regular physician, Dr. Frias, was not available.  Noah finds the boy exhibiting the symptoms of morphia toxicity, with leg tremors, a rancid odor, extreme perspiration and dilated pupils.  Noah asked the boy's mother, Mildred Anzchutz, if he had taken any patent medications which were not regulated and were known to have morphine as an ingredient.  She said that he hadn't taken any but that he had been taking a blue pill prescribed by Dr. Frias for a cough. Noah doesn't believe that Willard was not on any patent medications but has to take her word so he gives the boy 2 drops of laudanum and leaves to see 2 more patients. When he returned to the house later that night, the boy had died. However, he was able to get 2 of the blue pills that Willard was taking.

The next day Noah stops by the Anschutz home to pay his respects to the family. Here he finds himself accused of wrongdoing in the boy's death.  After leaving the house he goes to the local hospital lab to do tests on the blue pill to determine what it is made of. Dr. Frias finds out he is testing the pill and threatens to yank his license.  Noah later meets a radical working for a newspaper who tells him the paper is trying to break the Patent Medicine Trust. This radical/reporter knew about Willard's death and the death of other children from patent medications. Noah wants to get involved with research for the publication in order to clear his name but knows there is a risk with being associated with communists.  He does it anyway.

Deadly Cure was spellbinding!  I was hooked from the first page and could not put this book down.  The book had a fast pace, fascinating characters and an intricate plot. However, what I found most interesting was how aspirin and heroin were initially introduced in the U. S. as patent medications. In their beginning forms these drugs killed people. Various German companies worked on what eventually became known as aspirin and heroin and while their products were not healthy they were marketed to the public by physicians who became wealthy by prescribing them.  This history was expertly woven into the story by the author.

5 out of 5 stars!

Read it Again Sam Reading Challenge

I am going to join this annual challenge for the first time in 2019.  I will be joining at the "deja vu" level which requires me to read 4 books but I will probably upgrade the level during the year. I am itching to re-read some Anthony Trollope and Mark Twain, especially Twain's Puddinhead Wilson.  Old favorites like John Steinbeck, Herman Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Sherwood Anderson and Richard Wright are all coming to mind tonight but my mood changes quickly so who knows what I will read. 

The challenge runs the 2019 calendar year and is hosted by Bev at the My Reader's Block blog. 

Vita Brevis

Vita Brevis is Ruth Downie's 7th Medicus historical mystery featuring Roman physician Gaius Petraeus Ruso and his British wife Tilla.  In this installment of the series Ruso has been sent back to Rome from Britannia with the promise of a waiting job.

After a few weeks without work, Ruso is given a job temporarily replacing a doctor named Kleitos who suddenly left Rome to care for an ailing relative.  Upon moving into Kleitos' home and workshop Tilla finds a barrel on the doorstep.  Inside is a dead body. Ruso and Tilla quickly realize Kleitos disappeared to escape debt collectors and isn't going to return.

Vita Brevis is different from the previous books in the series which were historical mysteries. This book is historical fiction because Ruso and Tilla are not working together to solve a murder. It is still great reading as the plot moves along quickly.  There is something lacking, however, in the 2 main characters as neither of them are using their sleuthing skills and Tilla is not using her herbalist skills at all. In addition, Tilla does not act like her usual strong woman self while she tries to be a submissive Roman wife. Ruso spends more time on Roman politics than being a physician. The feel of the book is different but it still is interesting reading as the reader gets to watch them learn how to maneuver the Roman way of life.  However, I am unclear why the author chose to change her winning formula for this series.

Some of the secondary characters we are used to seeing in the series are absent as they are still based in Brittania. Their absence is strongly felt as the new secondary characters introduced are not as compelling as the old ones.

All in all this was a great read even with the changes in the formula.  I look forward to the next book in the series.  

Portugal

I waited 6 weeks for an Amazon 3rd party shipper to deliver this graphic novel to me and it finally arrived today. Cyril Pedrosa's Portugal is about a fictional cartoonist named Simon Muchat traveling to his family's country of origin in order to overcome his artist's writing block.

The story opens with Simon Muchat and his live in girlfriend Claire arguing over whether to continue their relationship by advancing it with the purchase of a home.  Simon decides to not discuss it and Claire takes her cue from Simon as a "no." Simon decides to travel to Portugal, the land his grandparents emigrated to France from, for a comics convention.  There he feels an attachment to the people he meets even though they are different from him and speak another language.  Upon his return to France, Simon and his father attend a family wedding of Simon's cousin Agnes whom Simon has not seen in 20 years.  A third of the book concerns the interactions of the family members during the wedding celebration week.

The family dynamics are what make this book.  It is an accurate depiction of what I think most families are like.  Each generation seems fractured by how they were raised.  The grandparents who emigrated from Portugal to France pined for their home in Portugal and the reader never discovers why they left although there is speculation.  The grandmother spent her whole life crying for everything she left behind.  The grandfather only communicated with the oldest child because he was born in Portugal.  The rest of the children were born in France so there is some sibling rivalry over the oldest being the favorite.  When these children grew up and had their own families they were not close families.  However, during the wedding celebration week, the children of the immigrants spent every minute of every day together reminiscing, making new memories and a little fighting.  They enjoyed each other's company though.

Simon then decides to return to Portugal to meet his relatives.  He stays in his uncle's home, which was formerly owned by his grandfather before he emigrated to France.  Here he discovers his family's history and ponders the reason why the men in the family are unable to pursue happiness, including himself.

The artwork is done is very dark colors, so dark that it is difficult to see the faces of the people in the drawings.  The drawings themselves are loose.  They look like pen drawings colored over with watercolor paint and are not detailed.  Each character's face is unhappy.  I am not sure if that is intentional due to how they are feeling or if this is the author's style.  It seems unusual to me that every character looks depressed.  However, during the last third of the book when Simon was in Portugal, the colors used were light. Obviously, the author used color to reflect the characters' emotions.

This book was rather depressing.  I enjoyed the middle part of the book when the celebration of Agnes' wedding occurred. However, the book is about Simon.  I could not feel any sympathy for him as a character.  The drawings of him did not make him look very likable and the colors that the author  used for the Simon scenes were not attractive.  I enjoyed Simon's search for his family's roots which is what the book is really about but the characters were unappealing and that detracted from the story.

The Abbot's Tale

I read Conn Iggulden's Genghis Khan series and loved it. The Abbot's Tale is a new novel set in Anglo-Saxon England in the year 937. It is a stand alone novel.

Dunstan and his brother Wulfric are placed in Glastonbury Abbey as youths by their father so that Dunstan can recover from an illness. Their father soon dies and their mother is put out of the family home by an older stepbrother but funds are available for them to stay at the Abbey. They want to leave for they suffer frequent beatings and hate the monastic life but there is no where for them to go.  Dunstan eventually becomes a priest and after claiming to have been rescued by an angel from a tower scaffold he adds to his story by saying that he had a vision of a grand cathedral.  King Aethelstan believes these stories and makes him the Abbot of Glastonbury.  From here Dunstan begins his  lifetime of service to seven kings, all descendants of Aethelstan.  His tale includes his participation in wars, exile to Ghent, traveling to Rome to meet Pope John XII, being named Archbishop of Canterbury and building a cathedral in Canterbury.

While Dunstan had quite the career, I was not as enamored with this book as I was with the Khan series.  I thought that parts of the story were paced a little slow.  However, the author did show the reality of life in the 10th century which could be quite cruel for those living during that era.  That said, the book is an epic story full of royal kings, cathedral building, Viking invasions, and war scenes that show the birth of the English nation.

I guess my disappointment with The Abbot's Tale is due to how much I loved the Genghis Khan series.  It did not measure up to the Khan books. Perhaps that is not a fair assessment but I was expecting more from the book.  Note that the author found a manuscript that was never intended to be read and needed to be translated.  It had gaps in its plot.  The author filled in these gaps with his own writing, added chapter headings and it became The Abbot's Tale.  He stated "It is my hope that the result gives some pleasure and casts light on an exceptional mind of the tenth century." Whoever wrote the manuscript did have a great imagination.  Of that, there is no doubt. He created a vivid character in Dunstan and gave him a fantastical life.  Due to the pacing, I could not stay interested in the story.

Death in St. Petersburg

Death in St. Petersburg is the first book by Tasha Alexander that I have read. However, it is her 13th historical mystery novel and Death in St. Petersburg is the 12th installment of the author's Lady Emily Mystery Series.

Prima ballerina Irina Semenova Nemetseva is found dead outside the Mariinski Theatre midway through a performance. Her friend and understudy Ekaterina Petrovna Solokova, takes over her top role in the ballet and finishes the performance for the evening.  Ekaterina ultimately is appointed the principal dancer position in the ballet company and becomes a suspect. Lady Emily and her husband Colin, appointed by Queen Victoria to oversee events at the Russian Court for her, investigate the murder at the request of a friend of the victim.

The plot moved rather slowly in this mystery and I was bored from the beginning. The main characters did not impress me.  I felt they were boring too. The story of the ballerinas was exciting but there wasn't enough of that in the book to keep me interested. The ballet dancers as characters were much more interesting than protagonist Lady Emily and her husband, a regular series character.

I wonder if this book is a cozy mystery. That may explain my dissatisfaction with the book as there are very few cozy authors that I read any more.  I used to love the genre but it no longer satisfies me. The writing style of Death in St. Petersburg seemed like a cozy which means I should not fault it for being a genre that I do not like. Regardless, I could not wait for the book to end.

2.5 out of 5 stars.

Sabrina

Nick Drnaso 's second graphic novel Sabrina follows his successful 2016 graphic novel Beverly. Sabrina has been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, the first graphic novel to be considered for this award. It was published in May, 2018 by Drawn and Quarterly.

Teddy's girlfriend Sabrina has gone missing putting him in a severely depressed state. He moves to Colorado to stay with an old friend, Calvin Wrobel, who is in the air force. Sabrina's sister Sandra calls Teddy a few times but he rebuffs her, not even attending her funeral. Teddy lays in bed all day in his underwear, listening to a shock jock radio host and only eats when Wrobel leaves food outside his bedroom door.

When a video of Sabrina's murder surfaces and goes viral, the media and the public goes into overdrive and conspiracy theories begin to point fingers at the victim's friends and family even though the killer is identified in the video. Sandra, Teddy and Wrobel all get threatening messages as the public begins to believe the video is fake and that one of them is the actual killer.

Sound familiar? This is what is happening in society today with our 24/7 news coverage of murders across the country. No one believes the truth anymore and our minds imagine new truths to fit what we hear on cable TV programs that talk about true crimes.  Sabrina is an indictment of our conspiracy theory society.

Sabrina is brilliantly  plotted with compelling characters. Some of the plot movements you only see from drawings with no dialogue. The emotions of the characters pop off of the page. The artwork consists of simple line drawings which are colorful, but the colors are all muted.

5 out of 5 stars!

2019 Creativity Reading Challenge

I am going to rejoin this reading challenge again next year.  While I expected to read more books for this challenge in 2018 than I have, I think I can do better next year by concentrating more on the art and crafts that I do the most: spinning fiber into yarn and colored pencil drawings. I still may post a review of a typography book and a cookbook next month but I am pretty much done with this challenge for 2018.

Introduction to Tesselations

I first saw this book in my public library and after reading it knew that I would be buying it for my personal library.  However, it was out of print so I found it on eBay and purchased it.  It was written by Dale Seymour and Jill Britton and was published in 1989  by Dale Seymour Publications.  A tessellation is a geometric pattern.  M. C. Escher was the expert on them.  Not being a very scientific person, I am always coming back to this book when I am trying to create a new drawing or quilt because the basics of these designs are hard for me to remember.  The results are always exquisite though.

There is another book on tessellations by a famous quilt artist, Jinny Beyer, that is extremely technical and I have never been able to get anything out of her book.  This book, however, is visual oriented and easier for  me to understand.  The book is not only written for the layperson but also for students in the 12 to 14 year old age range.  It contains hundreds of detailed graphic illustrations from the simplest to the most intricate.  Most of the illustrations are in black and white.  A few have red included in them but it would have been helpful to have more colorful illustrations to show the reader some shading ideas.  The properties of tessellating polygons are discussed as well as Islamic art, Escher type tessellations and tessellating letters.  Graphic paper and dot pages are included in the back of the book for the reader's experimentation.  I photocopied them for personal use.

As I mentioned earlier, the mathematics of these designs go way over my head.  I mainly use the hundreds of illustrations to play with when trying to create a design pattern.  I trace them onto paper and then color in different color patterns with different color palettes to see what I can come up with.

This is a great instructional book for quilters, colored pencil artists and people who love to create zentangles.  The illustrations inside will offer hours of experimentation and play.  

The Art and Craft of Poetry

Michael Bugeja's book on poetry has always inspired me to keep writing. While there are other books that get more into the technique of writing poetry, Bugeja offers a writing plan based on idea generation.

One of his idea generation ideas is to make a list of the high points, low points and turning points of your life.  Then, for each point, think about specific incidents that occurred and pick one to use. For each incident there should either be an epiphany or peak experience associated with it.  Your poem is the high or low point, the incident and the epiphany! He uses a system of writing a paragraph about the poem, sketching key elements of the poem, hold back the urge to write right away, think about the poem and then compose the poem.

The author has a separate chapter discussing the different aspects of love poems, nature and environmental poems,  extranatural poems, war poems, political poems and occasion poems.  For example, a love poem could be a complaint, love tribute, a proposal, love concept, an obstacle, absent love, love moment, a reconciliation, love token, illicit love or future love.  Each of the other category of poems have their own subcategories.  Then at the end of each chapter are Level One, Level Two and Level Three idea generation programs that would help you generate 10 poem ideas for each level.  The reader would go through the entire book using the Level One programs before going back and using Level Two, then Level Three.  The reader should keep all of these ideas in a notebook, journal, etc... before beginning to write.  You can see how inspirational all of these ideas are for the reader and how much material you would have to write with by the time you began to write.

The author has some information on technique.  He covers voice, the line, the stanza, the title, meter and rhyme in separate chapters.  Again, at the end of each chapter are Level One, Level Two and Level Three exercises where you go to your Idea File and begin drafting poems.

The third and final part of the book is about poem formats.  He discusses the narrative poem, the lyric poem, the dramatic poem, free verse, the sonnet, form poems, the sequence and the total poem in separate chapters.  Again, at the end of the chapters are Level One, Level Two and Level Three exercises where you work on your earlier poem drafts and revise them in the above formats. Mini anthologies of these formats are included for the reader's reference.

The Art and Craft of Poetry gets you into writing immediately.  It is the most practical poetry writing instruction book that I have ever seen.  Instead of just reading about how to write poetry, you learn how to write poetry by writing poetry itself.

10 out of 5 stars!

The Ultimate Guide to Colored Pencil

Gary Greene is my favorite colored pencil author/teacher.  I have most of his books and all of his instructional dvds.  In this Ultimate Guide to Colored Pencil he gives over 35 step-by-step demonstrations for both traditional and watercolor pencils.  A dvd is included with the book that shows how to create a colored pencil painting of a rose using traditional colored pencils.

While Gary Greene has written many books for beginning colored pencil artists, this guidebook could also be used by beginners.  However, I think it is more suited for the intermediate to advanced artist. The book contains information on the materials and tools that every colored pencil artist uses as well as how to use a reference photograph.  One feature that I have never seen in any other colored pencil instructional book are his comparison charts of the pencil colors of 9 different colored pencil manufacturers.  Concerning the reference photos, an intermediate or advanced colored pencil artist will find information on photographic anomalies and blunders and errors artists make when putting two or more photos together in a composite photo.

The technique chapter addresses all the techniques you would find in a beginner guidebook but these techniques are for artists who have done a few drawings already and have come across some problems.  Greene is very detailed when talking about the use of solvents with colored pencil and has a chart showing how 5 different solvents work with both wax based pencils and with oil based pencils.  He then has a chart showing how to mix colors with the solvents.  Burnishing techniques are discussed in extensive detail.  It is covered in 36 pages!  No other colored pencil author has given burnishing this much detailed information.  Part of the information covered includes demonstrations. Likewise, underpainting is covered extensively in 37 pages.  This is incredible and you won't find this information in any other colored pencil book.  I would know because I have them all.  The remainder of the book is demonstrations of techniques and combination of techniques that the reader should work on independently.

This Ultimate Guide really is an ultimate guide.  There is information in its pages that you won't find in any other colored pencil instructional guidebook.  For colored pencil artists like myself, practicing his techniques will only us better artists.  The demonstrations at the back of the book that the reader is supposed to work on independently will stretch not only my repertoire of skills but also my subject matter.  I am pretty much stuck on drawing birds and butterflies. However, I can now see myself drawing a landscape scene which has always seemed a little scary for me.

If you are a colored pencil artist, this is one book that you must have!