Tag: Peng Shepherd

Blurb Book Review: All This & More by Peng Shepherd (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ 1 Comment

Cover image from Goodreads.com

If you’re a fan of Choose Your Own Adventure, this is the book for you.

Marsh is unhappy with how her life turned out. She was on track to become a lawyer when she got pregnant. While she never regretted having her daughter, she did regret not finishing law school to become a high-powered lawyer.

A new technology has been invented: the personal quantum bubble. This tech was tested on a reality TV show called All This and More, where the contestant could make any change – big or small – to her life. This show was an instant hit, with more viewers glued to their screens than any other broadcast ever. Season one was such a huge hit that season two was announced.

But season two hit a snag and stopped production halfway through. Much later, season three began with Marsh as the contestant.

At first, Marsh is hesitant to make choices, but that hesitation falls away fast. Marsh grows more and more confident and takes bigger and bigger risks to have the perfect life. Glitches start to appear, like an ex-boyfriend appearing where her husband should be, and the word ‘Chrysalis’ shows up in every iteration of the bubble’s creations.

Marsh soon suspects something is very wrong with the bubble, but her producer and the bubble itself seem to be obstructing her from finding out the truth.

This novel is set up as a Choose Your Own Adventure, with big choices being made just prior to the next TV episode. The reader gets to choose what Marsh does next for each episode. The novel can be read linearly or the reader can flip back and forth in CYOA style. I did both, making sure I read every choice, just to see if everything gets covered (yes, it does, which is very satisfying). There are three possible endings as well, each one ending with a choice to read the Acknowledgements page or the About Author page, which was a nice way of keeping the consistency of the novel and making sure the reader knew that was the very end.

Overall, the novel was wildly entertaining. Marsh starts out hesitant and frightened of choosing and ends confident and able to decide what she wants. I admire the author for being able to pull this off – for being able to create timelines that are both consistent and coherent while being very different. Assembling the novel must have been a feat in and of itself.

I loved the author’s first work, The Book of M, and disliked the second one, Cartographers, so I went into I All This & More with a wary eye, but it turned out that I was glued to the pages throughout.

Blurb Book Review: The Cartographers by Peng Shepherd (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment
Image from Goodreads.com

It’s been a while since I finished a book. I’ve been busy planning for my first ever vacation and that’s taken up most of my brain power. I did finish this one, though.

When maps are made, the cartographer will often add a town that doesn’t exist as a way of copyrighting the map. These tows, in real life, are called Paper Towns and sometimes a town will sprout up in that location. In this novel, extra rooms or towns are called ‘phantom settlements’ and they can only be accessed by viewing the map as you go to the location.

I thought that was a really cool concept. Rooms that don’t exist unless you have the map? Fantastic! But the book’s focus was heavily romantic rather than magical realism. So heavily romantic that I think the book should be shelved under romance, not mystery.

The constant hand-wringing of the main character, Nell, got really annoying really fast. Sure, she had a relationship with another character, Felix, and when they were both fired from New York Public Library their relationship ended….but could there be more? Could they be together again? Could they ever love again? If you like romance, you’d appreciate this far more than I did. I just wanted to get on with the story about magic rooms.

In addition to my irk about romance, the author overused several phrases to the point where I was rolling my eyes by the end. You don’t need to tell me the ‘lion statues flanked the stone steps’ more than once. I can remember where the lion statues were once I’ve been told. I don’t need to hear about how Nell was so tiny that she drowned in her oversize cardigan more than once. Please use a different method of describing her, thank you. But for romance, this fits I guess.

The plot was a bit weak. Nell finds a bunch of maps in a dusty storage area of NYPL and brings them to her father, who heads the department. He pitches a fit over them. She fights him on them. Felix backs her up. Her dad has them both fired and shunned in the industry.

That seemed over the top. I mean, wouldn’t the father find a better way of dealing with these maps – one of which holds the secret to a missing town – than making a big stink about it? His insistence that it’s worthless only makes Nell investigate the map.

We find out later that Nell’s mom was in that magic town when all the maps to it burned. She died as a result. And since you can’t go to the town without the map, it was lost forever. The group of friends mapping the place out all go their separate ways and live their lives.

But then Nell investigates and discovers not all the maps were lost. One of them was in that bunch she found at NYPL.

I felt like the book took a long time to get where it was going. A lot of stuff could have been edited out as it was just repetitious. The climax was interesting but not particularly shocking.

Again, if you like romance, this might be an interesting mystery/romance for you. For me, I just wanted more action and focus on magic rooms and towns.

Blurb Book Review: The Book of M by Peng Shepherd (spoilers ahead)

~ Robin James ~ Leave a comment
Image from Goodreads.com

This book was fantastic, multi-layered, and engrossing. I’m honestly not sure where to begin.

The plot: People are losing their shadows. Without warning and without prejudice, the shadow just detaches and vanishes. When someone’s shadow is lost, they can do magic.

They can re-route roads, create walls of water, put wings on antlers, or make entire areas disappear. But there’s a cost: the loss of memories. The pull of magic is almost too much to resist, so the person will eventually forget what food or water is and perish.

While the book is told from four character’s perspectives, two stood out to me.

The first was Max. She loses her shadow two years after the phenomenon begins and decides to leave her husband, Ory, and the safety of the abandoned hotel they’d been holing up in. She takes her tape recorder with her and dictates her memories. While travelling she meets up with others who are heading to New Orleans, where they’d heard there might be help for the shadowless.

The author did a fantastic job of writing the slow loss of Max’s memory. At first Max doesn’t seem to be forgetting anything, but once her memories are noticeably failing, they degrade rapidly.

The second was The Amnesiac. This is a character who, just before The Forgetting incident, was in a car accident and lost all his memories. Diagnosed with complete retrograde amnesia, he recalls how to speak, what to eat, and whatnot but has no personal memories. While he’s told he loved sailing, it was just data to him, not something where he could feel the salt spray on his face.

He works with a doctor and the very first person to lose their shadow. As The Forgetting progresses, The Amnesiac tries to continue the doctor’s work of searching for a way to re-attach shadows to people. These new shadows don’t hold the memories of the person, though. A shadow of a rock will make a person comatose. A shadow of a book will give false memories.

The Amnesiac is able to use the dictation to create a new shadow, but does that shadow belong where it’s stitched? The author had me guessing right up until the reveal, which was fantastic.

I want to read this again, just to see if I can pick up the clues of the ending sooner. Also because the author’s rich worldbuilding had me engrossed from the first page to the last. Excellent book, and I’m eager to read more by this author.