Jake and the Gingerbread Wars by EG Foley

Title: Jake and the Gingerbread Wars
Author: EG Foley
Publisher: Foley Publications
Rating: WORTHY!

This Xmas novella started out rather sadly, but quickly picked up for me. We have a hero named Jake which is only one step away from the highly detested "Jack" - the most clichéd trope "hero" name of all time. As if that's not quite enough, he has a red-headed friend who is a motherly girl, and a male friend who is super smart. Jake appears to be something of a rip-off of Oliver Twist: he's an orphan who later discovers (over the course of a series of novels) that he's heir to a noble family estate and lives in a very magical world. Jake is, it turns out, an Earl.

The novel is set in Britain, and the author(s) (EG Foley is a pseudonym for two writers: romance writer Shana Gorian and her husband) does a good job with this, but unfortunately they don't know the difference between a Union Jack and a Union flag. It's only a 'jack' when it's flown from a ship, but pretty much everyone makes that mistake, and it's a Xmas story so I was willing to let more slip by than I normally would. In the end it was a wise decision because this novel really took off for me. I loved the punning chapter headings.

So with a few complaints out of the way, I have to happily relate that this novel launched from a really interesting premise. There's magic in the air - and it's of a little more substance than purely the magic of Xmas. Jake and his pals Archie and Dani are out Xmas shopping, and they discover two neighboring bakeries, the one upstairs a patisserie, the one downstairs, an English bakery.

They're run by rivals, who used to be intimates, but who are friends no longer. There's a good reason for this as you'll discover when you read. British Bob has the English bakery and he and his ex, Madame Marie, are running a competition to see whose gingerbread creation is the best. There's something rather weird, though, about those gingerbread villages....

This novel is, of course, set in Victorian times because that era, especially when experienced in England, is somehow seen as the best that Xmas has to offer, despite the wars and the appalling treatment of women and children. Oh, and did I mention that Jack the Ripper was a Victorian? Go figure! But again, it's an Xmas novel so I guess this is why everyone lets that slide.

Jake isn't your usual Victorian guy, though. He has a secret power of telekinesis: he can move stuff with his mind! This doesn't help him when he espies something curious flitting around the shop at great speed. He has seen fairies before, but never one which leaves a sparkly trail of red and green. Just as he thinks he can trap it, it causes a huge pyramid of pastries to fall and Jake can't even save the day with his power because it would expose his ability in public. "Crud!" thinks he as he realizes he must take the blame!

He resolves to have his revenge for this besmirching of his escutcheon by exposing this fairy, and along with his gryphon pet named Red, a friend named Archie, and a royal fairy of his acquaintance, he sneaks into the shop that night (his pick-pocketing and general criminal life of yester-year pays off here). The trouble is that it's not a fairy. It's a creature about whom Jake has neither experience nor very much knowledge, it turns out, but he's about to learn!

This new-found knowledge precipitates a road trip, and Jake and his friends (Archie, Isabelle, Dani, and Red) try to return this character, named Humbug, to his roots, and collect a reward. This also precipitates a lull in the story-telling unfortunately, as the group is held captive in a castle at one point and the story drops into the doldrums, but they soon escape. There are some oddities, too. At one point we get the nonsensical folklore that the Inuit ("Eskimos") have fifty words for snow, but it isn't true. They have no more words for snow than does any other culture.

There's also a strong religious thread running through this novel, the purpose of which escaped me. Perhaps it's just that the author is religious? At one point when someone mentions Xmas, we hear, "That's Baby Jesus's birthday!" which struck me as really odd. Baby Jesus's birthday? Why not just 'Jesus's birthday'? But this was spoken by a ten-year old, so it's perhaps explicable that way.

Head-scratching moments like this were more than offset by the writing at other times which I loved for the most part. One example, in chapter thirteen occurred when Jake said something which struck the others as dumb, and one of them asked, "Are you nickey in the head?" I almost lost it after reading that. I don't know why but it was so absurd a thing to say that it really caught my funny bone and spritzed my brain with all kinds of ideas and concepts for which I thank the EG's Foley heartily. Of course, I'll probably have forgotten everything I thought of then, if I ever sit down to try and incorporate said ideas into a story!

Like I said, some parts kinda bogged down, like the ice princess and inexplicably, the time spent at a certain workshop north of here (north of everywhere, come to think of it), but there were other parts which really got me laughing or made me really interested in turning the page. One of these, which I dare not forget to mention, was in Madam Marie's bakery, where Rollio and Juniette, the gingerbread star-cookie-cutter-crossed lovers were in dire peril of drowning themselves in a pail of milk, but it all worked out sweetly in the end!

I highly recommend this middle-grade novel. I loved it and I am sure the intended age range will adore it.

Season's Meetings by Amy Dunne

Title: Season's Meetings
Author: Amy Dunne
Publisher: Bold Strokes
Rating: WORTHY!

This novel is not to be confused with Season's Meetings by Catherine Winchester, which I haven't read.

Errata:
P209 "...batter an eyelid..." should be "...bat an eyelid..." unless they're really going to be coating eyelids with flour and eggs...!

P213 "...whatever funny antidote Sky was reeling off..." should be "...whatever funny anecdote Sky was reeling off..." unless relations between Cat and Holly have really become so bad that they're poisoning each other!

Author Amy Dunne (not the same one as the one in Amy Dunn Quits School) is from my own home county of Derbyshire in England, so yes, I'm completely biased, but since I didn't learn this until after I'd finished this novel and concluded it an excellent and highly worthy read, I don't care about bias! I'd thought this was Amy Dunne's debut novel when I read it, but it isn't. It turns out that she has another one Secret Lies which, despite the bizarre title, I'm now looking for. Hopefully there will be more after this one, too.

This is my Xmas novel review for today (I can't promise an Xmas novel every day this month, but I will be doing more). This one is a romance, but it's a little bit different from your usual affair: it’s a lesbian romance. That helped me to forgive the author for making the beginner's mistake of having a character look in a mirror so we can get a description of them. The author also impressed me by not writing in the first person, which is a voice I typically detest. On top of all that, the novel is set in Britain, so worth a look there, too. Yes, America, there are places east of the Atlantic, and west of the Pacific, and south of Texas, and north of Minnesota. And the main character is an atheist! How often do we get that? So we're off to a good start thinks I.

Cat Birch is still stinging over the demise of her live-in relationship with a girl called Paula which ended very unhappily and she's not dealing with it very well at all. She has no interest in life save for work, which isn’t exactly going brilliantly, and she isn’t eating well. She apparently has a drinking problem as well if we’re to judge her by the fact that she pours herself the dregs of a bottle of wine and "gulps" it down, followed by opening yet another bottle and pouring herself a "large glass". On the bright side, she does volunteer work for children's literacy, so it’s not all downhill.

Cat is looking at another Xmas alone until her secretary and her close friend trick her into going to spend Xmas with a goddaughter to whom she can’t say no, but even that seems like it’s falling apart when her flight has to be canceled so Cat can get some last minute work caught up. But at least she doesn’t have to go visiting over Xmas, does she? Well, Beth took care of even that. Now Cat has to travel with someone who's driving up to Scotland. The last traveling companion she expects is Holly - young, feisty, confident, playful, and as optimistic and positive as Cat is the opposite.

The drive in the car (which has a bonnet, a boot, and tyres!) was written well and was quite entertaining. Not that it would do me any good, but I fell in love with Holly during the trip! They're not making the journey in one run because of the weather, so they stop at a hotel half-way through the journey - and the weather goes sour on them. This bit really didn't make sense! It would have been smarter to keep driving, but Holly was tired and Cat doesn't drive, so we can let that slide.

The descriptive prose went a bit sour here. Cat notes that Holly has gold flecks in her eyes. Seriously? The number of times I've read that exact description in YA literature (not that this is YA) is nauseating. It would honestly be a really nice surprise to read a story where the love interest actually doesn’t have gold flecks. Plus Cat is a bit like a cat in heat by this point, which is also not very endearing. I would have preferred it if her responsiveness was more in keeping with what we'd read about her earlier.

I have to say that there were parts of this story that came off as rather false, too. I know it's important to put some chop in the waves so the relationship isn't a plain-sailing Mary Sue boring story, but if it's not done well, then it simply takes the reader out of the story and reminds then that they are, in fact, reading a story. One such instance was Cat's intransigence over telling her friend Beth about her blossoming relationship with Holly.

Cat does have reason to avoid this revelation: long ago she and Beth had vowed to each other that they would never get involved with each other's close friends or family, so now she doesn't want to tell Beth that she fell in love with a cousin. As a result, she and Holly have a fight and it looks like everything is in trouble. Then Beth decides she should bring blind dates to dinner one each for Cat and Holly! Eek!

The thing which immediately crossed my mind was that Holly had set-up Cat, or the both of them were set up by Beth with these blind dates, both of whom seemed too much like caricatures to be taken seriously. Whether this is true or not isn't something I'm going to tell you, because I've given way more spoilers than I like to for a new novel. The reason for doing that is of course that there were some issues I felt needed addressing.

The only other real problem was with the ease of travel. The two of them had been stranded in two feet of snow, with more falling. In those circumstances, I would have expected power lines to be down, and travel to be all but impossible except on major roads, yet there were no power outages, and within a day or two, travel was apparently completely unrestricted, even out in the middle of nowhere. This seemed unrealistic to me! The two travelers had no trouble getting out to Beth and Katie's completely-out-in-the-wilds residence, and there seemed to be no problem in not only finding blind dates, but also in the dates getting there too. It made little logical sense, but I was willing to forgive it because the story, overall, was really entertaining.

It also made little sense that Holly, who had presented as impressively mature, suddenly had a childish hissy fit and viciously announced that "It's over" at one point in the story. This seemed to come completely out of the blue, to say nothing about it being out of character, and turned me off her somewhat, although she won me around again later! OTOH, Holly had been given a heck of lot of provocation (and not in a good way!) by Cat's cowardice, dithering, indecision, a sorry lack of support, and general absence of backbone, but again, she had her reasons, too.

But it's time to be done with all this rambling and conclude the review. My conclusion is that this novel is excellent! It made my eyes water because of the ending. No, I wasn't crying...my eyes were just watering, okay? OKAY? It happens. Deal with it! In short I loved this novel and really became as engrossed as I was enamored by it. This is a couple I would be honored to know in real life. It's rather sad that they're only fictional. This is a wonderful Christmas read which I whole-heartedly recommend.