Color for Adventurous Gardeners, by Christopher Lloyd. Firefly Books, 2001

Christopher Lloyd is my favorite garden writer. He is very down to earth- no pronouncements from the gardening gods- and humorous. So of course I really like this book, but even if he wasn’t my favorite, I’d think this was a really good book.

First, he gives us the basics- mainly, that color is one of the last things you worry about when creating a garden. Structure, good soil, and the rest come first. Color is easy to change (except for trees), but it’s a lot harder to change up hardscape. He points out that color harmonies are wonderful, and that he uses them a lot himself.. but.. he likes some excitement in the garden. So he pairs something like an intense orange dahlia with a purple verbena. Sometimes shocking color is fun. He says that you need to know the rules before you can break them, but that one should go for wild combos.

Then he give a chapter to each color, running through the spectrum and including black and brown. He gives a lot of plants that fit the chapter, including what growing conditions they like. The book is filled with gorgeous photos, as well. It’s not a coffee table book of all pictures and little info; it’s got a lot of information, provided in an informal voice, as if you were talking to him out in the garden or discussing the garden over tea. Five stars. 

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This did not influence my review. 

The Night Child, by Anna Quinn. Blackstone Publishing, 2018

Nora is a high school teacher with a knack for connecting with at risk students. She’s also the mother of a 5 year old daughter, and has a husband who is cheating on her, a fact which she is aware of but not wanting to deal with. One afternoon, sitting in her classroom after school, she sees a vision of a young girl with blue eyes. It leaves her rattled and confused. Then, a day later, she sees the face again, and this time it speaks, telling her to remember the Valentine’s dress.

Her husband is dismissive and doesn’t really want to hear about it. Nora goes to doctors; when they find nothing physically wrong, she sees a psychiatrist. During the session, she suddenly starts speaking in a little girl voice, and says she is Margaret. This is when stuff gets really serious. Nora’s –Margaret’s- past starts coming back to her, and it’s not pretty. Not only is it ugly, but she begins to see how it’s affected her entire adult life.

When I requested this book from Net Galley, I thought it was a supernatural horror story rather than what it is. This is kind of a hard book to read because of what Nora went through as a child. People who have undergone sexual abuse may find it very triggering. But for all the bad, there is signs of growth and renewal. This is a very well written book, but not one I would have picked up knowing what it was about. Most of the characters aren’t very well developed; they are very secondary to Nora and Margaret and what they are going through. Four and a half stars. 

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

I received this book free from Net Galley in return for an honest review. 

Neither of these things influenced my review.  

Dawn of Steam: First Light, by Jeffrey Cook and Sarah Symonds. 2014

“Dawn of Steam: First Light” is the first of a series of books set in an alternate past. The Napoleonic Wars have been won by England (with help from the USA and others). Dirigibles already exist; some were used in the war. The USA is still largely unexplored by Europeans, as are most parts of the world. But a book exists, written by an explorer, wherein he tells of his journeys across the North American continent (there is a Northwest Passage, he claims), to Australia, China, Japan, South America, and Antarctica- basically, the whole world. Two men make a bet in a club; one believes the book is the truth, one doesn’t. Therefore, two teams will set out to duplicate the author’s travels, to see if they are even possible. We follow the course of one of the teams; the good guys. Told through letters and a diary, it is almost all in first person by an ex-soldier who knows how to work a camera. He writes to his fiancé and to the gentleman who has made the bet and is financing the journey.

The first almost half of the novel is spent gathering the team. They assemble a group that has the skills needed to make the expedition a success. While this part of the book may be necessary to introducing the cast to us, it’s overly long. With so little action, I nearly gave up. When they get to North America (via one member’s family airship), they have a couple of events that, while full of action, do not move the story forward. They do finally start across the continent, but the plot never really works out; there is no build up and climax- it’s just sort of “and then we did this and then we did that”.

I didn’t care much about the characters. The basics were there and could have been great (and maybe they are in the later books in the series), but there was nothing built around “sharp shooter”, “lady engineer”, or “daughter of the explorer who passes as a man most of the time and can do damn near anything”.

I was sadly disappointed, especially because I’d enjoyed the first book in the other series these authors have written. Only three out of five stars.

The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something- anything- from Amazon, they will give me a few cents. 

This did not influence my review.