Morbid Romantic

Book Review & Personal Blog

Marked (House of Night, Book 1) by P. C. Cast & Kristin Cast (Paperbackswap)
In 16-year-old Zoey Redbird’s world, vampyres not only exist but are also tolerated by humans. Those whom the creatures “mark” as special enter the House of Night school where they will either become vampyres themselves, or, if their body rejects the change, die. To Zoey, being marked is truly a blessing, though she’s scared at first. She has never fit into the human world and has always felt she is destined for something else. Her grandmother, a descendant of the Cherokee, has always supported her emotionally, and it is she who takes the girl to her new school. But even there the teen stands apart from the others. Her mark from the Goddess Nyx is a special one, showing that her powers are very strong for one so young. At the House of Night, Zoey finds true friendship, loyalty, and romance as well as mistrust and deception. She realizes that all is not right in the vampyre world and that the problems she thought she left behind exist there as well.

Vampire Academy (Vampire Academy, Book 1) by Richelle Mead (Paperbackswap)
After two years on the run, best friends Rose, half-human/half-vampire, and Lissa, a mortal vampire princess, are caught and returned to St. Vladimir’s Academy. Up until then, Rose had kept Lissa safe from her enemies; school, however, brings both girls additional challenges and responsibilities. How they handle peer pressure, nasty gossip, new relationships, and anonymous threats may mean life or death. Likable narrator Rose hides doubts about her friend behind a tough exterior; orphan Lissa, while coping with difficult emotional issues such as depression and survivor’s guilt, uses her emerging gifts for good. Mead’s absorbing, debut YA novel, the first in a new series, blends intricately detailed fantasy with a contemporary setting, teen-relevant issues, and a diverse, if sometimes sterotyped, cast of supporting characters. Occasional steamy sex and a scattering of vulgar language demand mature readers, but teens able to handle the edgy elements will speed through this vamp story and anticipate the next installment.

Legacy by Cayla Kluver (From author)
Duty-bound to wed her father’s choice in successor to the throne, Princess Alera of Hytanica believes that she is being forced into the worst of all possible fates—a marriage to the arrogant and hot-tempered suitor, Steldor. When a mysterious boy from enemy Cokyri appears bearing secrets and an entirely different view of what’s appropriate behavior for a young lady, Alera learns that her private desires threaten to destroy the kingdom. When Narian’s shocking past comes to light, Alera finds herself in a shadowy world of palace intrigue and ancient blood feuds, facing an uncertain future with dwindling options—and must learn to decide between right and wrong all alone. Marked by witty, rapid-fire dialogue and dramatic complexity that belie the writer’s age, Legacy brings a fresh, new sensibility to age-old questions of duty and inheritance and to a young heroine’s quest to find her true voice.

Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South by Adam Rothman (Purchased from Amazon)
Rarely is an author’s first book so mature in its balance and authority. Rothman sets out to explain “why slavery expanded” under the leadership of members of the revolutionary generation and their successors, and why it expanded especially into the Deep South of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, lands that were part of the Louisiana Purchase. The settlement of the lands southwest of the original coastal Southern states by slave-owning planters set the stage for the Civil War. The speed and form of settlement of those territories as their economy became based on cotton and, to a lesser extent, sugar cultivation were inconceivable without the use of slaves. If Rothman’s broadly researched work doesn’t offer any fresh interpretations of the peculiar institution, he chooses his illustrative stories with great skill and has mastered the existing literature. The realities of slavery appear in all their vividness, as does the distinctiveness of the white cultures of the region, especially Louisiana’s. One comes away from this readable, energetic work by Rothman, an assistant professor of history at Georgetown, appreciating how much the nation’s vaunted past—its military successes, its democratic growth, its economic might—owes to the enslavement of people out of Africa.

Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market by Walter Johnson (Purchased from Amazon)
Instead of focusing on cotton plantations or broad historical patterns, this extraordinary study is a flesh-and-blood daily history of the slave market. NYU history professor Johnson takes readers inside the Dixie slave pens and traders’ coffles (long rows of slaves manacled and chained to one another). His focus is New Orleans, North America’s largest slave market, hub of a trade that decimated African-American slave communities by tearing families asunder–destroying marriages and separating children from parents. Using former slave survivors’ narratives, letters written by slaveholders, docket records of cases of disputed slave sales and Southern medical and agricultural journals, Johnson interweaves the voices of traders, buyers, auctioneers and the slaves themselves. He shows that, for white Southern slaveholders, buying slaves buoyed a fantasy of manly bourgeois self-control, speculative savvy and economic independence. Slaves, meanwhile, assessed the character of particular buyers and sometimes, at enormous risk, manipulated a sale to their own advantage. The evil business of slavery has seldom been exposed with so much humanity and insight as in this eloquent study, scholarly yet wholly accessible, a compelling cross-sectional microcosm of millions of human tragedies.

Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic by Jeffrey L. Pasley (Purchased from Amazon)
In pursuit of a more sophisticated and inclusive American history, the contributors to Beyond the Founders propose new directions for the study of the political history of the republic before 1830. In ways formal and informal, symbolic and tactile, this political world encompassed blacks, women, entrepreneurs, and Native Americans, as well as the Adamses, Jeffersons, and Jacksons, all struggling in their own ways to shape the new nation and express their ideas of American democracy. Taking inspiration from the new cultural and social histories, these political historians show that the early history of the United States was not just the product of a few “founding fathers,” but was also marked by widespread and passionate popular involvement; print media more politically potent than that of later eras; and political conflicts and influences that crossed lines of race, gender, and class.

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