Big Adventure: spring came early!

This week has been such lovely weather (sorry MA family and friends!) I have managed to get in a lot of reading and Keegan and I have gone on a few adventures!

more photos later

I have been using the kindle a lot lately, loving having access to library books right from my bed!
I read two historical fiction books this week by Susanna Kearsley: Mariana and The Shadowy Horses.

Mariana is about a woman who has felt an intense compulsion to move to a specific house in the English countryside since she was a child. Finally in her early thirties circumstances come together and she leaves London and moves into her dream house. Soon after she begins having intense hallucinations to what may be flashbacks of a previous life - dreams of a young woman names Mariana who lived during the plague in the same house. This book was fine, I think the character development was sub par and Kearsley has written better novels.

Much better novels like this one! The Shadowy Horses takes place in England as well but revolves around an archeological dig that is hunting for the long lost Ninth Roman Legion. They have decided to dig in this particular spot because there is a little boy who lives nearby who claims that he can see the ghost of a Roman legionnaire haunting the area….whooooooooooo! I enjoyed this novel a lot (although I think i may have read it before?), it really made me want to go dig for artifacts!

continue for more reviews and spring weather (incl some cute birds)!

This book I found on the library kindle website and I chose it because of the cool leaf on the front (I always choose books by their covers). The story was fine, it took me a few hours to read and I was able to lay in bed without waking Keegan up because my kindle has a back light. I don't really recommend it to anyone but a teenager but there were some interesting parts - the story takes place in the aftermath of a hung war between humans and faeries and the world has some very interesting changes due to the fallout. I loved the descriptions of the plants that have come to life and the rivers that have minds of their own.

This last book, City of Stairs, I grabbed at random off the New shelf at the library and I am SO GLAD I DID. Although I didn't know it at the time, I have read and reviewed a few other books by Robert Jackson Bennett: The Troupe and American Elsewhere (looking back at old posts is so funny, I read Elsewhere at Para before I even had a job there!). Stairs is another story that takes place in the aftermath of a war; 75 years ago a colony, Saypur, rebelled against the colonizing country, the Continent, totally decimating it. They won by defeating/ killing the Divinities that ruled the Continent. The Divinities were just what they sound like, divine protectors of the country who ruled from the city of Bulikov. Now the country's history has been erased and censored. When a Saypurian historian is found murdered, a spy is sent into Bulikov and this young woman begins to suspect that the beings who once ruled the country, and therefore the world, may not be as dead as they once seemed.

This books sounds kind of lame magic-y, but it was so well written, Bennett creates incredible worlds.

This one line, one page three of the book, has sparked so many thoughts off in my brain: "Though can we really call ourselves occupiers, thinks Mulaghesh, if we've been here for nearly seventy-five years? When do we graduate to residents?"

This is never something I have really seriously thought about, even as a history major and history teacher. What I first tried to figure out was, in my own personal opinion, if I was to make judgements on other people: is there a difference between a baby born to two Mexican immigrants on U.S. soil and a baby born to third generations British occupiers in India (obviously back in the colonization/ exploitation part of history). I would say that yes, the first baby is American and that yes, the second baby is British. But why? Is baby 2 is born on Indian soil and her parents were born on Indian soil doesn't that make her Indian? Am I subconsciously accepting the weird idea that the land under a diplomat's feet belongs to the country she represents?

Keegan says that it all comes down to wealth and resources, that we accept baby 2's claim to be British because at the time being Indian was not a great situation to be in.

Fascinating.

ANYWAYS.

It was 74 degrees this weekend and so Keegan and I went on a little jaunt!