The Emotion Thesaurus - Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi

If you have a fiction writer on your holiday list and you're still trying to figure out what to get him or her this year, I am here to recommend The Emotion Thesaurus.

One of the hardest things for a novelist to do is to figure out how to explain their characters' emotions to readers without hitting them over the head with them. We're supposed to be showing, not telling -- but how do you convey intangibles? How can you telegraph to your reader that Naomi was really, really angry at Joseph without saying it? How do you get your readers to feel her anger? Because it's the visceral experience that will bring them into your story and hook them there.

Ackerman and Puglisi provide entries for 75 emotions. Each entry offers both internal and external physical cues, mental responses, and other useful information. For the entry on anger, for example, we could say Naomi stood with her feet planted wide apart, glaring at Joseph. She might shake her fist at him. From inside her own body, she might feel her teeth grinding or her pulse pounding. Mentally, she might jump to conclusions or react irrationally to something that's not a big deal. If she's been mad at him for a long time, she might be in the habit of venting her anger by breaking her own things, or she might have an ulcer. Or if she doesn't want him to know how angry she is, she might turn her body away from him and avoid eye contact, or make passive-aggressive comments.

Mind you, you wouldn't want to include all of those cues in a single scene. One or two would be plenty, or else you'll be tipping it over into melodrama. But using any one of them sure beats simply stating, "She was mad." Right? And I got all of them from a single entry in The Emotion Thesaurus. It's a great resource.

The Cascade Annihilator (The Second Internet Cafe, Part 2) - Chris James

Lucas Hunter is back in this second installment of Chris James' sci-fi series, and he's still jumping back and forth between historical timelines. But see, that's his job. He's a dimension researcher -- someone who travels to parallel universes that have branched off from ours, to discover what might have been in our world if history had gone a little differently.

In the first book, The Dimension Researcher, Lucas ran afoul of a guy named Dietrich on one of his trips. Dietrich is from a timeline that would like to see the Second Internet Cafe shut down. In this book, Lucas and Dietrich cross paths again, but this time Dietrich is packing the ultimate weapon -- a cascade annihilator, which is a device designed to collapse realities and make alternate timelines disappear as if they had never existed.

While Lucas is chasing Dietrich across realities to thwart his nefarious plan, the Second Internet Cafe itself is under threat of defunding by the international coalition that operates it. Shutdown is imminent -- and that could strand Lucas in unfriendly circumstances. An analyst named Paula Featherstone gets involved in the fight to keep the facility open and its mission intact.

James knows how to build tension, that's for sure. The Cascade Annihilator had me on the edge of my reading chair for a good bit of the book. My one quibble: both Lucas and Paula tell their stories in first person, which is fine, but sometimes I had to read a little way into the chapter to figure out which "I" was narrating. However, it's not a fatal problem by any stretch of the imagination. I enjoyed The Cascade Annihilator and I sure hope a third volume is on the way.

Through the Door (The Thin Veil #1) - Jodi McIsaac

For the past seven years, Cedar McLeod has been going through the motions: raising her six-year-old daughter Eden and working as a graphic designer at an ad agency to keep a roof over both their heads. Her mother, Maeve, watches Eden while Cedar works. But Cedar has never gotten over Eden's father, Finn, who just up and disappeared before Cedar could tell him she was pregnant. One day, they're so in love -- and the next, poof! He's disappeared. No explanation and no goodbye.

Then one day, Eden opens her bedroom door and finds Egypt on the other side.

Clearly, something weird is going on here. And soon, Cedar begins to figure out what it is. I won't give you any spoilers, but suffice it to say that faeries are involved, and maybe Finn was forced to leave, and maybe Eden's cool magical gift has put them all in danger.

I said Cedar starts to figure things out soon -- but she could have gotten there sooner.To me, Through the Door seemed to go on a tad too long. The fae kept refusing to give Cedar their secrets, Maeve kept telling Cedar not to trust them, Cedar kept getting more and more worked up, and I came very close to wanting to throw something at all of them and tell them to get on with it, already.

Still, Through the Door is a pretty good read, particularly if you're into urban fantasies that feature the fae. Book 2 of the trilogy, Into the Fire, is available now, and the third book is due out in May 2014. I wasn't so enamored of Through the Door that I rushed out to buy the next book, but I expect I will probably read the whole series eventually.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Between NaNo and preparing Thanksgiving dinner, I kind of forgot to do a review this week.

So instead, I'll just tell you how thankful I am for all of you.  Happy Turkey Day, everyone.

www.magickalgraphics.com

Grumpy Old Menopause - Carol E. Wyer

For women of a certain age -- and I count myself among them -- the so-called "change of life" can be no laughing matter.  Hot flashes are just the start. Later on, menopause brings us such joys as an increased risk of heart disease and osteoporosis, to say nothing of mood swings to rival the teenage years -- at a time in life where at least some of us are dealing with actual teenagers.

And the medical profession, by way of helping us through it (as if women haven't been going through menopause for centuries without clinical assistance) and -- let's be honest -- in an effort to monetize yet another "ailment", offered us hormone replacement therapy. Except that the therapy turned out to be worse for our health than the symptoms it was supposed to alleviate.

Yeah. We could use a bit of humor about now.

Enter this book. Wyer wrote Grumpy Old Menopause as a companion volume to her How Not to Murder Your Grumpy -- a self-help book for women whose husbands had retired and were at loose ends (many of which loose ends were their wives' last nerves). That book was an A-to-Z list of activities for your "grumpy" so he would get out from underfoot and leave you alone.

Grumpy Old Menopause follows the same A-to-Z format, except the entries here include much useful advice about coping with menopause -- everything from herbal remedies to exercise to activities to take your mind off your changing body (raising alpacas, anyone?). And she includes a number of jokes to lighten the mood, at least one of which made me laugh out loud. No, I won't tell you which one it was! Go read the book!

One caveat: Grumpy Old Menopause is aimed at the UK book market, so some of the slang terms might be unfamiliar to American readers. (Suck it up, honey. They have to parse our slang often enough.) But for us women of a certain age, it's worth the trouble.

***
Notes: Wyer is my fellow contributing author at indiesunlimited.com. Publication date is November 25, 2013. I received an ARC of this book in return for an honest review.

Mother of Wolves - Zoe Brooks

Mother of Wolves is a novel of magical realism that features a strong female protagonist in a native culture.

As the novel opens, Lupa is married to Toro, the king of their tribe, the Lords of the Earth. He has been offered a shipment of guns by the local guards, and he is readying a party of men to go to receive the shipment. Lupa has a bad feeling about the meeting -- and as it turns out, her fears are justified.

When Toro does not return home, Lupa goes to investigate. She uses superior tracking skills to determine that Toro's party was ambushed and her husband killed, leaving her with their children to raise alone. Her anger over his murder and her lust for vengeance fuel the rest of the story.

Time and again, men discount Lupa's intelligence and cunning. And time and again, it leads to their downfall. Lupa disguises herself and marries the commander of the guards responsible for Toro's death, and then bides her time until the day she can take her revenge. Later, sought for the commander's murder, she goes to ground in her people's territory, calling on the spirits of the land and her own ingenuity to evade those looking for her. And as the men of her tribe watch her carry out her plan, the Lords begin to examine their beliefs about Lupa -- as well as about the competence of women in general.

It's never quite clear where the novel takes place -- whether it's a specific location on earth or in a fantasy world. But it doesn't matter. The themes of the novel -- the treatment of native populations by their conquerors, and the treatment of women by men -- resonate no matter where the story takes place. I enjoyed Mother of Wolves and look forward to reading more of Brooks' work.

Stone's Ghost - Melissa Bowersock

I know, I know -- Halloween was last week. But November, too, tends to lend itself to dark and mysterious goings-on. So I offer you a ghost story that's less scary than introspective.

You may remember when the city of Lake Havasu, Arizona, bought the old London Bridge from the city of London, England (the one that crosses the Thames today is a new span), and rebuilt it over the Colorado River as a tourist attraction. The main character of Stone's Ghost, Matthew Stone, lives in Lake Havasu. His livelihood is due in part to the bridge -- he owns a jet ski rental place and is, by all accounts, a great guy to work for. He's dating a wonderful woman and is kind to his mother, who lives nearby.

And then one night, crossing the bridge, he nearly runs down someone. He returns to apologize, and discovers that she's a ghost.  Matt doesn't believe in ghosts, but he finds himself drawn to Janie. Bit by bit, he pulls her story out of her, and the more he learns about her, the more he is able to come to grips with some of the kinks in his own thinking. But will he be able to sort out his own head in time to keep from losing the best parts of his own life?

This isn't a horror novel, despite the "ghost" in the title. The reader can never quite decide whether Janie is real, or whether she's the manifestation of things Matt has kept himself from thinking through. And that's okay, because it's Matt's transformation that really matters.

Stone's Ghost is well-written and well-edited, and written in an engaging style. I heartily recommend it.