Review: Chasing Secrets by Gennifer Choldenko

First, thanks to Wendy Lamb Books and Edelweiss for allowing me to read an egalley of this book. Although I got a bit behind on my e-galleys, and ended up having it expire 50 pages before I was done. And that was a really exciting bit of the book!  So I had to check it out once it was available to finish, so that I could go ahead and see just how it all wrapped up and write a review.  Now I have read one other book by this author, Al Capone Does My Shirts, and I really enjoyed it as well.  I think I enjoyed this one even more because of the science aspect with the Plague in it. 

The main character in this story is a 13 year old girl named Lizzie.  She lives with her father, who is a doctor, and her brother.  Her mother had passed away when she was younger, and her father is a doctor who will take trades or goods, rather than money for his services some times, so she also lives right next door to her aunt and uncle, her uncle who is the head of a large newspaper.  That way her aunt can oversee her education.  She goes to an all girls finishing school, which she hates.  She enjoys the times when she can go with her father on his house calls and she can learn about being a doctor.  She lives in San Francisco in 1900.  Girls don't do things like she wants to do.  And so her aunt is often unhappy with her. 

There comes to be a rumor of the plague in Chinatown, and it gets quarantined, which means their trusty servant Jing can't get back.  But his son shows up having come to stay in Jing's room to be safe.  With his dad gone, Lizzie is the only one who knows he is there, but she must get food to him so that no one else will find out and kick him out.  Along with all of this, she wants to help get Jing back.  She also makes a friend at school, who has a brother that ends up being a friend, and maybe more.  She decides maybe dancing isn't quite so bad when Jing's son Noah teaches her how to dance.  She does all kinds of things that aren't safe for a girl in that day to do, as well as proper.  And the plague does seem to actually be there as they find more and more dead rats, and even have the sickness come into their own home and family.

I love the history, the characters, all of it.  I love how at the end of the story the author gives so many facts and tells you just what was real, what wasn't, and what might have been.  Another great book by this author, and I am now going to be pushing her books to all librarians and teachers.

The Hazards of Working at a Bookstore Vol. 3.0

I see all the Waiting on Wednesday posts of the people I follow and realize that at some point I need to get back to doing that one. Not sure what I'm waiting on though, that I haven't already talked about at some time in the past. Maybe next week I can come up with something. So, I will post about 3 books I saw yesterday while working at the store.
First is Forgiven by Janet Fox. From what I see online this is a 2nd part of a series. The first in the series is called Faithful I believe, but I don't know exactly what it's about. However this story sounds interesting to me. I'm guessing it will be set during the time of the great San Francisco earthquake, but not sure. Basically the main character is Kula who has just moved here from Montana, I assume that is where the first book took place. She has come here to save her father, and somehow gets swept up in the upper society in San Francisco through the art world. There is a handsome David Wong, who with his charming ways threatens to break through her reservedness. It says that when disaster strikes, she must learn to unlock her heart. I'm guessing the disaster is the earthquake, and so I'm intrigued in this as a historical type fiction.


Second is more of a humor type book called How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe by Charles Wu. This goes along with the other How to survive a zombie apocalypse type books I think, except I assume it covers kind of all of the different situations. Except, this is a story. The main character is Charles Wu, and he is a time travel technician. He has to save people who try to do the one thing they should never do, travel into the past. His father is the inventor of time travel who then disappeared. So Charles is trying to find his father, and with a book given to him by his future self, same title as this book, he thinks he might find his father.




Third is Zombie High Yearbook '64 by Jeff Busch. This isn't really a book to read, more of a book to look at the pictures and laugh. Not sure how funny compared to Cake Wrecks or Awkward Family Photos it will be. But I thought it was interesting and tied in to all the new zombie related books and novels around. Basically it is a tribute to yearbooks from those days, and it ties in zombie stuff with civil rights movement, and other things in the time period. Sounds like a fun look through for people who enjoy zombies.

Ill Wind by Kevin J. Anderson and Doug Beason

Well, I feel like this is the first adult fiction I've read in a long time. Wait though, I really don't like using the term "adult fiction". In my mind it brings up the idea of an "adult bookstore" with it's XXX signs and showing an ID to get in. So maybe, just to help my own sense of silliness, I'll say this is my first "grown-up" book in a while. :-)

This was a pretty good book. I talked about it in one of my Hazards of Working at a Bookstore blogs a few weeks ago. I can tell, now that I know it was published over 10 years ago, that it wasn't published that recently. While it probably was repackaged and released with the big oil spill we had last year, there are surely some things that could stand to be updated technology wise. But, all in all, it was a good story.

Basically it is the largest oil spill in history, and it happens in San Francisco Bay. The oil company tries to save their image by releasing an untested "designer microbe" that will eat the oil and anything made of petrocarbons. It should be done once it eats the oil spill, but as it was untested, they don't realize it can travel through the air, and it does. And it eats not only oil, but gasoline right out of cars gas tanks, synthetic fabrics, and plastic. In a few days, there is no way to make cars go with no fuel. And any plastic has dissolved, and this causes problems that you don't even realize because of how many minor things are made of plastic that we don't even realize.

The world turns into the past, with really no communication other than a few science labs that figure a way around it. The president is killed as he is visiting one of the oil supplying nations and his plane has brought the microbe with it and destroyed their countries as well. The Speaker of the House ends up as president and decides Martial Law is the best way to keep the nation safe. But not everyone agrees with hanging kids who are out after curfew or who have stolen a can of tuna. And when one military commander decides to stop a science testing area where they may be able to solve the energy problems, people decide to fight back.