Ankerita

Ankerita: Seasons Out of Time is a 2013 Gothic horror young adult novel by Robert Wingfield. It was published by The Inca Project and released in November 2013. It is the first book in the The Seventh House series. The author’s website can be found here. I was provided with a free copy of the book in exchange for an honest review.

The novel follows Ankerita, later called Anna, a woman from the Tudor era who escapes the grave she’s been imprisoned in for over five hundred years after her resting place is unintentionally disturbed. She takes on the life of one of the vandals who released her and finds herself thrust into the modern world. She is able to see restless spirits and is forced to intervene in order to put them to rest. As a woman without identity, Anna must also dodge the attention of the authorities and prevent her return to the grave and succumbing to the plans of demons attempting to claim her soul.

Ankerita, or Anna as I will refer to her for the rest of this review, was my favorite character in this story. She’s incredibly complex and just when I’d start to think I knew everything about her character, there’d be a new facet to her revealed. I won’t lie, when I started reading, I thought Anna was going to be an antihero. Early on, the reader learns that she was imprisoned at an abbey, and later cursed with living death, because she killed her husband. Her first act in the story is to trick Tox, a graffiti artist, into taking her place at the abbey so that she can escape. Yet, Anna isn’t quite an antihero, but instead a young woman trying to recapture the life she was robbed of. in addition to that, when Anna gets into trouble, which happens quite a bit, she doesn’t wait around to be rescued, but in most cases, manages to get herself out of danger. She meets too many people on her journey to list, but there are a handful that left a big impression. Captain Slash, the ghost of a highwayman, she meets early on. He was the character I found to be the most entertaining, especially on the few occasions where he comes to her aid. She is also followed by a demon named Didiubas and its not clear whether he’s helping her or just getting Anna into more trouble. It depends on what exactly she’s doing at the time. While this book had some heavy and dark moments, the characters helped the story feel balanced.

This novel tells the story of a woman out of time, and one of the things that I enjoy about it is the author’s commitment to that idea. Anna is thrown five hundred years into the future and the alien-ness of the world around her shows. She retains some knowledge of the modern world from the body she’s inhabiting, but there are many moments where her actions or behavior shows that she’s brand new to this world. Many times, this takes the form of her wording things in a way that no one else understands, she sounds a bit like Shakespeare at times, but her inner monologue also reveals aspects of that. I enjoyed reading her struggles to understand and live in the modern world and adapt to things. Many stories where a character is thrown forward in time, or backwards in some cases, depict a short adjustment period and no longer-lasting implications beyond that which tends to annoy me because it glosses over how much things change over a few centuries. Ankerita’s depiction of a woman out of time is the most realistic one I’ve read, possibly ever.

The pacing of Ankerita isn’t as structured as some other novels, but that works in the novel’s favor. Rather than having a strict progression of events that lead from beginning to end, the novel is a series of adventures that Anna experiences as she moves throughout the United Kingdom, sometimes by her own volition, and sometimes because of the actions of others. She’s trapped between the real world and the afterlife, allowing her to see ghosts around her with unfinished business. As she moves through the country, and searches for her place in this strange new world, she’s slowly being nudged towards her destiny, which she doesn’t want to accept, but everything she does only pulls her closer to it. it’s a story as much about exploring the world as it is about self-discovery.

I tend to avoid spoiling things in my reviews as a rule. I’m going to abide by that rule in this review, but that makes it a bit difficult to discuss the end of the story, especially given that this is the first book in a series. I enjoyed the ending a lot, especially the twist that came in the last few pages to set up the sequel and make the reader reevaluate everything that had happened previously. Wingfield did an excellent job of bringing the story almost full circle, but not completely in order to deliver a great ending. I finished Ankerita and wanted to read the next book.

I enjoyed Ankerita overall, but unfortunately, no book is perfect. There are a few things I need to address that I wasn’t as thrilled about as most of the story. Wingfield was able to combine humor into the horror aspects of the story pretty well for the most part, but there were a few scenes where it didn’t quite fit in my opinion. The humor in those moments just felt a little off.  There were a few things that happened that were confusing and didn’t really make much sense or weren’t explained enough to make sense. I was able to understand most of the events in the story, but the few that confused me took me out of the story.

Ankerita was a book that surprised me. I didn’t expect to enjoy it as much as I did. It starts with a great premise and uses that premise to tell an engaging and unique story. The author’s writing style is one that I enjoy and its an easy book to lose oneself in.  As this is the second book I’ve read and enjoyed by Robert Wingfield, the first being Countdown to Omega, its clear that he’s talented at writing in more than one genre. I’d recommend it to any Gothic literature fans out there and I can’t wait to read the sequel.

Rating: 4.3 Stars

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Five Endings I Hate (and Five I Love)

I think about endings a lot. While the beginning of a story needs to be intriguing to get the audience interested, a bad ending can ruin a story. I’ve been thinking about endings a lot recently, due to a few factors. One is reading some books with less-than-thrilling endings. Another is that, as of writing this post, two shows that I’ve watched for years have ended in the last week. While this is a book blog, and I mostly talk about book endings, some of the ideas listed below also apply to shows.

Five Endings I Hate

5) It was all a dream: This category also includes the story being a simulation or the final thoughts of a dying character. This is pretty much the epitome of lazy storytelling, because it was all a dream, like using time travel, means you don’t have to write an actual ending. It means the story, and the stakes, weren’t real and that I shouldn’t have cared. The only time this has worked is in The Wizard of Oz, and that only worked because Dorothy knew she was dreaming the whole time, so it wasn’t some last-minute subversion.

4) The rushed conclusion: If you spend hundreds of pages building up the villain/main conflict and it gets resolved in less than five pages (ten if the book is longer than 400 pages), you didn’t plan your story well. Or you didn’t balance other elements as well as you could’ve.

3) Back to the Start: In most cases, the story/plot is a journey. If the characters don’t change in some way, or they change but end up in the same position as at the start of the story, its not emotionally satisfying. One of the biggest complaints I heard about the Game of Thrones ending was that characters, mainly Jon Snow, started and ended in the exact same place, because it rendered their character arcs pointless. This doesn’t just apply to characters either. If the village/country/world is being ruled by a tyrant, don’t end the story with a different, but just as tyrannical, guy in charge.

2) Tonal Dissonance: Call me crazy, but an ending depends very heavily on the story that precedes it. If the novel has been gritty and dark the whole time, it shouldn’t have a bright, clean “everything’s all better now and everyone’s happy” ending. Similarly, if a book deals with some pretty light topics, or it’s a general coming-of-age story, having everyone die or something horrible happen at the end doesn’t make sense. Don’t have a general fiction novel turn into a spy thriller in the last 20%.

1) Death. All of the DEATH: I’m going to say this, and then get off my soapbox. (This applies more to shows than books, but whatever). I’m a fan of redemption arcs, when done well. I know that sometimes, characters need to die. However, just because a series is ending doesn’t mean you have to kill the main character. “Hero sacrifices his/her life to save the world” is good sometimes, but not others. It’s not the only type of sacrifice that can take place. And, in stories that are about a character finding redemption, killing them off cheapens that redemption.

Five Endings I Love

5) Foreshadowed: I love endings that are foreshadowed enough to give me a hint at what’s going to happen, but not so much that I can guess at the start what’s going to happen. The right amount of foreshadowing makes it look like the author planned and outlined the story really well, and upon editing, refined some of those ideas/plotpoints.

4) Clear Intent: Every book has a theme, or a message the author is trying to put across. The trick is for the author to make it clear what he or she is trying to say. Even if I didn’t like the way the book’s main conflict is resolved, if it’s clear that the author had a specific intent and the ending drives that intent home, I view it as a good ending. I don’t like Animal Farm all that much, but Orwell’s closing sentences did exactly what they were supposed to do and left the reader with the exact message as he was trying to send.

3) Emotionally satisfying: Some stories have happy endings. Some are more bittersweet. And some have dark endings. Which one works and which one doesn’t depends on the story. A lot of series have these, a lot do not. if a book has a central mystery, the mystery needs to be solved. If it’s about overthrowing a dystopian government, government need to get overthrown. As I mentioned above, you can’t give a dark story a happy, shiny ending. And if at the end, I’m wondering why I wasted my time reading/watching this, it wasn’t satisfying. As example of a conclusion that wasn't emotionally satisfying was the White Walker storyline in Game of Thrones. While seeing Arya kill the Night King was cool, it wasn’t emotionally satisfying because the Night King had been a major part of Jon’s story, not Arya’s.

2) Can’t Go Back: Would you like to know what one of my favorite film moments of all time is? It’s in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, when Frodo explains to Sam why he’s sailing to the Undying Lands. He says “We set out to save the Shire, Sam. And it has been saved, but not for me.” I love this scene because its one of the few scenes where a character acknowledges how much their journey has changed them. Frodo saved the Shire, saved all of Middle Earth, and he returns home to find that he doesn’t belong there anymore. Endings that acknowledge this, whether its to this extent or a lesser one, will always outrank one’s where the hero accomplishes their goal and goes home.

1) Not Really An End: I like stories that don’t wrap every single thing up. This isn’t the same thing as an ambiguous ending, though, where you either don’t know what the ending means or the major conflict felt unfinished. I like being able to close the book, knowing how the main conflict was resolved, but still wondering what happened next. It speaks to the idea that nothing every really ends.

Those were some book (and TV) endings that I hated and some that I loved. What are your opinions on endings? Which ones do you dislike? What ending is your favorite? 

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Sister Carrie

Sister Carrie is a 1900 novel written by Theodore Dreiser. It tells the story of an 18-year-old girl from Wisconsin who leaves her rural life behind and moves to Chicago. While in Chicago, Carrie begins realizing her own version of the American Dream. This starts out as her becoming the mistress of a man with higher standing than she does, but progresses to her going into the theater and becoming an actress.

While Dreiser’s novel didn’t see much praise by the general public when it was first published, it did receive positive reviews and has been referred to as one of the greatest American novels. Most of the praise the novel received centers around the sense of realism in the novel. The descriptions of life in New York and Chicago around the turn of the century were praised for how accurate they were, for better or worse. Other praise centered around the novel’s realistic depiction of the human condition, with one review even stating Sister Carrie didn’t have “the slightest trace of sentimentality or pettiness”. Criticism at the time of the novel’s release centered around Dreiser’s writing style, which many found to be lacking and highlighted his own lack of education. There was also criticism over the sexual content it contained, which is laughable by today’s standards, but was shocking in 1900. Somehow, despite the lack of sales and heavy criticism, Sister Carrie survived over a century to the modern day.

While very little of the critique at the time of the novel’s release seem to be about the story itself, most of the things I dislike about Sister Carrie relate to the plot and characters. To be blunt, I don’t like any characters in this story. Carrie is fickle and seems to only care about furthering her own social standing, to the point of me hoping she gets run over by a trolley. She had dreams of moving to the big city and being rich, which there’s nothing wrong with, but everyone who tries to bring her down to reality is entirely written off. Carrie wants what she wants and at no point do other people factor into her behavior at all. George Hurstwood, who is one of the men Carrie has an affair with, not only cheats on his wife and steals from his employer, for Carrie no less, but he doesn’t seem to grasp how little the object of his affection truly cares for him.

Most other characters are one-dimensional at best, serving a purpose only to further along the plot. Carrie’s sister Minnie wants Carrie to focus on getting a new job after losing her old one and when she can’t, or doesn’t want to, Minnie’s family can’t support her which sets off the chain of events that leads to Carrie becoming someone’s mistress. One of her neighbors in New York serves the sole purpose of making Carrie dissatisfied with what she already has, which is remarkably more than most other New Yorkers.

My main issue with Sister Carrie is the plot itself. I spent the entire length of the novel waiting for Carrie to run into an obstacle. Any obstacle. She doesn’t get the part she wants, or someone from her past resurfaces, or she loses what she’s already gained. None of that happens. Carrie goes from one high point, to another and never pays for any of her actions. She has setbacks, but they never set her back too far or inspire any kind of change. This plot I’d be more likely to accept if she wasn’t such an awful person. At the end of the novel, Carrie’s rich and famous, but not happy, and comes to the conclusion that if she isn’t happy now, perhaps she’ll never be.

Sister Carrie is an American classic and like most other classics, that doesn’t make it enjoyable. If I were to rate every classic I’ve ever read, this one would probably rate pretty low. None of the characters are interesting or even likable, the plot is meandering and has no real flow to it, and overall, its just boring.

Rating: 1.4 stars

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The January Short List

Photo by Ed Robertson on Unsplash

I know some of you might be reading this and thinking “the short list, what does that mean?”. Well, its pretty simple. I read a lot of books, but I don’t necessarily review all of them. This is for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there are books that I don’t feel strongly enough about to review, and for some it just doesn’t work. Sometimes, the book in question discusses a very niche topic or it’s one of those books that isn’t meant to be taken too seriously or analyzed. I’ve been thinking quite a bit about books like this, so I’ve decided to create The Short List, which gives me a chance to talk about these books without writing a full review. In order to preserve my own sanity, I will be posting these towards the end of every month.

With my explanation out of the way, let’s get into January’s Short List.

Is God a Mathematiician by Mario Livio

This is a non-fiction book written by an astrophysicist. The book examines the connection between mathematics, which is a collection of abstract concepts, and the physical world. It tried to answer the questions of how, if math is an entirely intangible concepts that humans invented, can it be used to so easily explain things in physical reality? For example, the work of  British mathematician who was well-known for his contribution to number theory (the study the properties of whole, positive numbers), was used decades later to make breakthroughs in cryptography. There’s also the matter of earlier individuals such as Pythagoras, Archimedes and Isaac Newton, whose discoveries in their time have wide applicability today. The book attempts to answers a simple question: did we discover math when learning about the world around us or did we invent math and it just so happens to explain so much about the world around us?

This book is on the Short List, because not many people I know personally would be interested in a book like this. I have a math degree. If I had the money, I’d probably be working on earning a Master’s degree in math right now. I found this book interesting, but not everyone will.

I Could Pee on This (And Other Poems by Cats) by Francesco Marciuliano

Yes, this is a book of poems. Yes, these poems are written from a cat’s perspective. It’s a little weird, but it’s a fun book with a creative premise. I bought it on a whim because the title made me laugh. It’s a short, cute, fun read and anyone that has or had cats should read it. There are lots of cute cats pictures inside as well.

What Will I Be? STEM Edition By Katie Greiner

I know you might be thinking, this is a kid’s book. Why did you read a kids book? Well, two reasons. One, I have somewhat of a connection to the author. While I’ve never met her, she and I are both alumnae of the same sorority, from different colleges, for women studying in technical fields. I wanted to support one of my sisters. Second I liked the message it was sending. 

There’s a stigma around women studying math, science and technology and I, for one, am tired of it. This book tells kids, especially girls, that they can be a doctor or an astronaut or a computer scientist and I like that message.

The Prose Edda

This is, no doubt, the oldest book I’ve ever read that’s not about the Trojan War. It was written in the 13^th century in Iceland. It’s one of the most well-known pieces of Scandinavian literature and our biggest source of information about Norse Mythology. Unlike its older relative, The Poetic Edda, it gives more detail into the myths it tells and it’s a little easier to understand, since The Poetic Edda is, as one might guess, a collection of poems. Given that The Prose Edda takes inspiration from The Poetic Edda, they’re sometimes referred to as the Younger Edda and the Elder Edda respectively.

As someone who, up until reading this, had only read Greek myths, the differences are quite fascinating. Every mythology has a creation myth, but very few have a detailed, soon-to-come destruction myth. I would advise anyone thinking of reading this, or anything derived from this book, to leave anything you learned from Marvel comics at the door, since they changed quite a bit.


Those were all of the books I completed in January but did not review. I know that this is a very varied list, but variety is the spice of life as they say. What are some books that you read this months? Any recommendations?

Dorothy Must Die

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Dorothy Must Die is a 2014 young adult fantasy adventure novel by Danielle Paige. It was published by Harper Collins. It was the author's debut novel and is the first book in the series, also titled Dorothy Must Die. The author has written a number of prequels since the series debuted, explaining some events that set-up the world of the story in addition to the main series. The novel can be purchased here from Bookshop.org.

The novel tells the story of a teenager named Amy Gumm from Kansas. She's neglected by her mother and bullied at school. One day, their trailer is swept up in a tornado and Amy wakes up in Oz. Except, the Land of Oz is very different from what the books and film portray. Instead of a beautiful, bright, happy place, it's a grim dystopia with the facade of being a dreamland. Good witches are bad, Wicked witches appear to be good and even the Yellow Brick Road is crumbling. It turns out that Dorothy found her way back to Oz after returning to Kansas and decided to seize power for herself. Amy is recruited by a resistance within Oz to help rid the land of Dorothy.

I'm very skeptical of retellings, continuations or re-imaginings of popular and beloved stories. While there have been many good ones, there have also been an untold number of ones that don't quite work. I was pleasantly surprised by how well this one worked and fit into the existing world of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Now, just to be clear, I didn't hate Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, but the explanation that was given about why Dorothy returns to Oz (Kansas was too dull after experiencing Oz) and how Oz fell into its current state (Dorothy was given an immense amount of power and its gone to her head) make sense. It's easy to understand, in that context, how Dorothy, Glinda, the Scarecrow, Tinman and Cowardly Lion became dark perversions of themselves. The book had a great hook, but a so-so execution of that idea.

Let's discuss the characters first. Amy is the main character, and she has a lot of personality. She's three-dimensional, she has a goal driving her forward throughout the story. The other characters aren't as well fleshed out. The characters we know from The Wizard of Oz's characterization begins and ends with "what if they were evil and their admirable traits are taken to a dark extreme". They're evil now, but one-dimensional evil. As for Amy's allies, they're meant to seem complex, but for the most part, they all fit into the categories of "I'm your ally because your enemy is also my enemy" and "trust me, but don't trust me too much" which was refreshing to begin with, but after the third or fourth character basically said those exact things, it got annoying. There were also a few characters who only appear in a handful of scenes who were a little too fake-edgy for me. Maybe the trope of "tough guy/girl" just didn't translate well in my opinion,  but there were some lines of dialogue that just read as overkill to me. I wanted to like these characters, and hate the ones I'm supposed to hate, but the only character I liked was Amy and I couldn't connect with any of the others.

The pacing of Dorothy Must Die is a bit slow. The beginning tells us a bit about Amy's life and her problems. We see enough to get a feel for the character, but too much, since what really matters is Amy traveling to Oz. Once she lands in Oz, however, the plot slows down. Paige was dropping the reader into a world they were supposed to already know, but had been drastically changed. This is Oz, but not the Oz we know. As a result, there needed to be a degree of world-building added to the story in order to explain how and why Oz had changed. I enjoy world-building, but not if it comes at the expense of the story being told. There are lengthy parts of this book where Amy doesn't appear to be doing anything that furthers the plot. Instead, they're being used to build up Dorothy and her friends into these horrible monsters that must be destroyed when the reader already knows that. Part of this pacing issue is due to this being the first book in the series. There needed to be a lot of set-up for future books, which meant the plot itself doesn't have a lot going on.

An aspect of the story that I did enjoy was that the author didn't shy away from making things dark in this new Oz. Not only do characters say how terrible Oz has become, but it's shown. There's blood and gore and scenes that are genuinely frightening, which I liked. When stories tell me that a place is horrible, but never show an example of it, it gets under my skin. If you want me to think something or someone's bad, you need to show something that verifies it. In this story, the terrible world is backed up by the terrible events the reader gets to witness. I also enjoyed the fact that, while it did slow the plot a bit, Amy's training with the rebellion wasn't glossed over. I don't enjoy time skips, but I also don't enjoy wishy-washy explanations of how a character who's never fought before can suddenly kick butt. The story showed enough of her training to indicate it was happening, but focused more on relevant lessons she's learning than just adding to the length.

I liked Dorothy Must Die, but I didn't love it. The premise behind the novel is intriguing, even though the execution leaves a bit to be desired. Some of my criticisms are due to this being the author's debut novel and those tend to need a little bit more polish than a non-debut novel. There are also aspects that I found disappointing that are a result of this being the first book in the series. There's a lot of world-building and explaining, with not a ton or plot and very little resolution at the end. I haven't decided whether I'm going to read the next book in the series, The Wicked Will Rise, but this book didn't disappoint me to such a degree that I'm adverse to the idea. Dorothy Must Die had a lot of potential and maybe my expectations were a bit too high going into the story.

Rating: 2.7 stars

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