The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf
The Star Online: Lifestyle: Bookshelf |
| Posted: 04 Apr 2013 06:37 PM PDT SAMPLES from The Manager's Phrase Book: > When an employee wants time off: "I don't see any problem with that." > When an employee is burned out: "I see some symptoms of burnout here; I sure hope I'm wrong." > How to close a meeting: "Alrighty, let's get out of here!" > When you need to instill calm: "Everybody here needs to take a chill pill." > How to say no to a superior: "No". |
| Funny and fanciful tales for teens Posted: 04 Apr 2013 06:36 PM PDT Adorkable Author: Sarra Manning Publisher: Little Brown UK, 387 pages JEANE Smith, 17, writes a style column for a Japanese teen magazine and she manages a successful lifestyle website that promotes dorkiness as an art form. On top of that, The Guardian placed her at number seven on their "people who are changing the world" list. Despite all that success, though, Jeane is lonelier than ever. Then she meets Michael Lee, a predictable and proper all-round golden boy who represents everything Jeane doesn't believe in ... and yet, and yet ... Jeane finds herself inexplicably drawn to him. The Amazing Terry Jones Presents His Utterly Enchanting And Thrilling Fairy Tales Author: Terry Jones Illustrator: Michael Foreman Publisher: Pavilion Books, 120 pages WHAT do you get when you combine the hilarious Terry Jones of Monthy Python fame with award-winning illustrator Michael Foreman? A collection of wonderfully fractured tales of fantasy featuring everything from a boy who has a dinosaur in his shed to a globetrotting talking fish, and a brave princess who sails to the moon. Balthazar (Evernight # 5) Author: Claudia Gray Publisher: HarperTeen, 384 pages THE Evernight series by Claudia Gray began four books ago in 2008 and is mainly about teens Bianca and Lucas, a creepy academy of vampires, and battles between vampires, vampire hunters, and wraiths, oh my! One of the most popular characters from the series, the handsome, affable and generally-good-hearted vampire Balthazar, gets his own story in book number five. His backstory is that his family was brutally murdered by powerful vampire Redgrave four centuries ago, and Balthazar has been alone ever since. Here, he meets human girl Skye Tierney who is being targeted by Redgrave because of her newfound psychic powers. He vows to protect Skye but at the same time, he is consumed by the need to avenge his family. And amidst all the chaos of going up against an uber vampire, Balthazar finds his heart and realises that he is falling in love. Hidden (the Avena series) Author: Marianne Curley Publisher: Bloomsbury USA Childrens, 336 pages MARIANNE Curley, Aussie author of the bestselling Guardians Of Time series, begins a new series called Avena. Ebony grows up in a sheltered world where she is home-schooled by her parents and her friends are limited to a small, closely-guarded circle. As she reaches adulthood, though, something inside her is changing: she feels physically stronger and she begins to ... glow. No, not just with good health but literally glow! Her parents have a lot of explaining to do. Middle School: My Brother Is A Big, Fat Liar Authors: James Patterson & Lisa Papademetriou Illustrator: Neil Swaab Publisher: Random House, 304 pages THRILLER writer James Patterson's offers another instalment of the funny Middle School series that began with Middle School: The Worst Years Of My Life. In this book, we meet Georgia, sister of the mischievous star of the previous books, Rafe Katchadorian. Georgia is just entering middle school (the American equivalent of Malaysia's secondary school level) and makes a bet with Rafe that she's going to do so much better than he did – little knowing that Rafe had been so infamous that no one wants to give his sister a chance to prove herself. Wanting to sway the odds of winning the bet in his favour, Rafe secretly signs up Georgia's band to perform at the school dance. In front of her crush and her rivals, the snooty popular Princesses! How is Georgia going to handle this curve ball? Geek Girl Author: Holly Smale Publisher: HarperCollins, 356 pages WHAT happens when a geeky, awkward girl gets a chance to reinvent herself as a fashion model? Harriet is most definitely a geek – she knows facts like, the average person laughs 15 times a day and that a cat has 32 muscles in each ear but can't figure out why she's not popular at school. Then she gets talent scouted by a top model agent and is determined to change her life. Along the way, though, she has a terrible fight with her BFF, catches the unwanted attention of the queen bee, the dreaded Alexa, and finds herself constantly lying to the people she loves. In the fashion industry, things aren't going too well either, as Harriet veers from one fashion disaster to another. That's when she realises that perhaps this model life is not for her after all. But will Harriet be able to get her old life back before getting consumed by her own model behaviour? |
| Seal Team 666 offers thrilling yarn Posted: 04 Apr 2013 06:35 PM PDT The military and horror genres collide in a thrilling yarn featuring a hero who was once possessed by a Malaysian demon. Really. Seal Team 666 Author: Weston Ochse Publisher: St Martin's Press, 310 pages SO, we've all read and watched tales of the supernatural where the protagonists/victims find themselves thoroughly unprepared and under-equipped for encounters with anything more terrifying than a wet cat. Why not a tale of horror featuring a group of highly-trained, well-armed warriors with the latest gear, surveillance and intel, kicking otherworldly butt even more effectively than the Ghostbusters? That kind of thinking is probably what resulted in SEAL Team 666, by former US Army intelligence officer Weston Ochse. This chap has been writing professionally since 1997, more than a hundred short stories and several novels, mostly in the horror/dark fantasy genre, and I'm a little disappointed (with myself) that I never got wind of his work before. Ochse's inside knowledge of military and defence matters serves SEAL Team 666 well, and it also helps that he is quite skilled at crafting page-turning scenarios, making the book an engrossing and speedy read. Like the book-cover quote says, this is like "The X-Files written by Tom Clancy" – a whimsical idea that the US government actually has a dedicated multi-agency initiative to combat supernatural threats, with its ground ops handled by the titular team of specially chosen SEALs. The author doesn't beat around the bush, with the first of SEAL Team 666's unnatural opposition making an appearance just a few pages into the book – "It stepped forward. Glowing eyes. Taloned hands. Dark skin stretched tightly over elongated bones. Demon." Certainly not the kind of paragraph you'd expect after several pages describing a by-the-book night-time infiltration of a hostile-filled compound with silent insertion, sniper cover, silenced weapons and double-taps on unsuspecting sentries. After one member of the unit is killed in action, green cadet John Walker is pulled out of the final stages of his own SEAL training to fill the vacancy. He never bargained on being thrown feet-first into a war against supernatural forces, but then his new comrades never figured on getting him, either. You see, Walker is not just any rookie. He is a survivor of a particularly nasty bout of demonic possession in his childhood, by – of all things – "a Malaysian hantu kubur, or grave demon". Seems the entity was sent after him as punishment for some unforgivable crime perpetrated by his father, who used to run contraband around the Philippines black market. Uh, you read all that correctly, even the spelling. Hey, take it up with Ochse. This somewhat liberal interpretation of the hantu kubur legend aside, the book does a good job of carefully feeding the reader glimpses of Walker's suppressed childhood trauma, relating it to his experiences in the present. His possession has turned him into something of a "sensitive", as such folks attuned to the supernatural are sometimes termed. As the FNG (well, two of those letters stand for "new guy" – guess what the first stands for) in the unit, Walker and his uncanny ability have a hard time fitting in, earning him the ire of team leader Holmes. Yet, even with a past like his, Walker soon finds that the only normal day in his military service was yesterday. The rapid pace of the story results in characterisation that is mostly superficial, with the exception of Walker. One or two of the other SEALs do have their moment, particularly their strategist, Laws, as he attempts to piece together the big picture behind their current batch of missions. This big picture involves bizarre animated rag-dolls called homunculi; vicious demonic creatures that transform from stone into unnatural flesh when splashed with blood; and suits stitched out of human skin (someone call Clarice Starling!). The book's pace hardly slows down for more than a few pages before the team gets whisked off on yet another job, and sometimes this almost episodic structure works against it because the narrative just becomes one multi-part cycle of covert insertion, completing the mission, (sometimes hasty) exfiltration and wound-licking. Ochse's no-frills prose lends itself well to this fast-flowing tale because he just gets down to business without excessive situational analysis or long pauses while the characters examine their motives or engage in some pace-killing reflection. Maybe with the exception of Walker, but at least his interludes are mostly about that creepy hantu kubur possession episode. There is a fair amount of discussion about hardware (as in military grade, not home DIY) put in and this could impede story flow for those who aren't into guns and ammo. Given the genres mashed up in these pages, I figure that most people who've come to this party wouldn't mind anyway. There isn't a whole lot of reading material in the "military horror" sub-genre (unlike military SF, which is so richly served) but SEAL Team 666 is kind of a crowd on its own. All told, a good effort that has been called Ochse's breakout book, which should bring him a wider audience; going by what is on view here, that is well deserved. Bring on a sequel, hopefully one with zombies or werewolves in it. And some pretty, glittering vampires too, just so the SEALs can shoot them in the head with projectiles made from frozen holy water. |
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