Mundie Moms

Friday, June 3, 2011

Book Review & Interview with Forgiven author Janet Fox


Published by Speak/Penguin
Released on June 2nd, 2011
Source- ARC from TLA
4 stars- I really enjoyed it

Kula Baker never expected to find herself on the streets of San Francisco, alone but for a letter of introduction. Though she has come to the city to save her father from a cruel fate, Kula soon finds herself swept up in a world of art and elegance - a world she hardly dared dream of back in Montana, where she was no more than the daughter of an outlaw. And then there is the handsome David Wong, whose smiling eyes and soft-spoken manner have an uncanny way of breaking through Kula's carefully crafted reserve. Yet when disaster strikes and the wreckage threatens all she holds dear, Kula realizes that only by unlocking her heart can she begin to carve a new future for herself.

Forgiven is the perfect companion book to Faithful, it follows the story of Kula, a secondary character from Faithful with an extraordinary story. Kula's journey takes her from the beautiful rugged wildness of Bozeman, MT to the enchanting, and sometimes dangerous high society of San Francisco, CA.

In Faithful I had some reservations about Kula, but with Forgiven I felt like I was really able to understand her. She's had a rough life and now that her Pa is going to be hanged for a murder he didn't commit, Kula travels to CA to find a box her father sent her to retrieve. Along this dangerous journey Kula will unravel a past full of secrets and deception and in the process she'll learn to let go, find herself and fall in love.

She's also had her fair share of prejudices from having to work at a young age in Faithful as a maid. It's Kula's feisty determination that I loved the most about her. It's what makes her a strong character in a twisty world she's just beginning to understand. What I find intriguing about Janet's writing is not only does she have in-depth, complex characters who's stories are all woven together, but she brings her settings to life. She has a talent for not only giving a vivid picture of what San Francisco looks like in the early 1900's, but how society behaves, including the darker part of the city with it's human trafficking, racism. She introduces that world via her characters David Wong, one of the love interests for Kula, and the Chinese's girls who have been trafficked. Being deemed an outsider because of her darker complexion Kula herself is a beautiful character and is able to understand what David Wong and the young Chinese girls she meets are feeling.

There are so many layers to Forgiven's story and I really liked how many of the character's are all interconnected. I liked that I was able to piece together each character's connection to her story with her. I felt the story moved flawlessly and while it's a little darker than Faithful's, I felt more of an emotional connection to it and more of an adventurous one Faithful. Forgiven has a rich history that not only includes child slavery & trafficking, but the April 1906 earthquake. There's plenty of adventure, mystery and romance in this story. Though Kula is a character found in Faithful, you don't need to read Faithful to follow Forgiven's story, but I highly recommend picking up both books. You can read my review for Faithful here.
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We love historical fictions. What inspired you to place both Faithful and Forgiven during the early 1900's?
Faithful, my first novel, is set in 1904 for a number of reasons. For one thing, I wanted to research Yellowstone Park of that era, and I chose that year because it was the year that the Old Faithful Inn opened. And then I wanted Maggie, my main character, to experience the great changes taking place in society at that time – changes in technology (i.e., first flight) and in attitudes toward women (emergence from Victorian constraints). The main character in Forgiven is a secondary character in Faithful so it was natural to keep the story set in the 1900s – specifically, 1906. And for both novels I find that period, the beginning of the twentieth century, fascinating for it was a time of rapid transformation in America following westward expansion and the emergence of an industrial as opposed to agrarian society.

What do you admire the most about Maggie, your main character?
Her ability to change. Maggie is not a very likeable girl when we first meet her – she has certain beliefs about how life should be and she’s spoiled. But as she progresses through the story she changes in every way: she begins to understand herself, her father, her mother, and the environment around her. She begins to accept her limitations and her strengths. She learns to love things that she once feared. And she learns to stand up for herself and what is right.

I love that Forgiven is a companion novel to Faithful. What drew you to writing about Kula's story?
I love the character of Kula. She jumped off the page for me. She’s feisty and demanding and uncertain and insecure, and I loved everything about her. It was such a pleasure to spend time with her while I was writing Forgiven. I love how she figured it out, how she learned about herself.

Like Maggie, Kula is a strong female character. What is something you feel you have in common with Kula?
Wow – well, we’re both stubborn! And we’re both insecure. And we both believe in doing the right thing, or what we believe is the right thing.

Though both stories have different settings throughout their stories they both share a brief similarity with Yellowstone as their settings at one point in each story. What inspired your settings for both Faithful and Forgiven?
I love Yellowstone. My husband and I fell in love here many years ago, in the greater Yellowstone region; now we all live here year round which is a dream come true. When my son was young we spent time every summer in the Park, exploring. I feel like I know it intimately, and could happily spend the rest of my days in and around the Park. What a magical place it is. Part of what makes Yellowstone magical for me is the geology, because I have a degree in geology – and that’s what drew me to San Francisco in 1906. That was the year of the great earthquake, and so was a major historic event that I felt compelled to write about.

If you could go back in time, what era would you want to go to & what city would you visit?
Ooo – good question! Ancient Greece is very appealing, and I’d want to attend the theatrical events in Athens. Renaissance Europe – maybe France – but only if I was nobility, because life as a commoner was pretty awful; and then I’d want to be in a fortress in the south, because northern Europe was beastly in the cold weather. But most of all I would love to see the American west around the time of Lewis and Clark. For that, I’d sleep under the stars.

You can visit Janet at her site here and follow her on facebook here.

Book Review: Faithful

By Janet Fox
Published by Speak/Penguin
Released on May 13th, 2010
Source- Bought
4 stars- I really enjoyed it

Sixteen-year-old Maggie Bennet's life is in tatters. Her mother has disappeared, and is presumed dead. The next thing she knows, her father has dragged Maggie away from their elegant Newport home, off on some mad excursion to Yellowstone in Montana. Torn from the only life she's ever known, away from her friends, from society, and verging on no prospects, Maggie is furious and devastated by her father's betrayal. But when she arrives, she finds herself drawn to the frustratingly stubborn, handsome Tom Rowland, the son of a park geologist, and to the wild romantic beauty of Yellowstone itself. And as Tom and the promise of freedom capture Maggie's heart, Maggie is forced to choose between who she is and who she wants to be.

Faithful is fantastic historical fiction set in the early 1900's in the wilds of Yellowstone and it's surrounding areas. Janet Fox has done a brilliant job at capturing the turn of the century feel in the wild west. At the heart of the story is sixteen year old Maggie, who's been whisked away from her life of privilege on the east coast and brought to live in a wild, untamed landscape.

It wasn't hard to understand Maggie. She's been raised a certain way that at first comes across snobbish. She's grown up in a high society where women are worldly and their status determines the type of man they're marry, which is of course a big thing for Maggie since she's almost seventeen and of age. I completely understood Maggie's frustrations and her acting out as she's brought to Yellowstone understand false pretenses, thinking her father took her there to find the mother that left them years before. It's here where Maggie's character grows the most and she discovers who she really is. She uncovers the truth about her family's hidden secret, she learns about the vast landscape and the importance of preserving it and what I liked most about her is seeing how much she changed.

With the beautifully detailed rugged landscape of MT and WY to bringing to life what it was like to be a sixteen year old girl brought up in this time period with the mannerisms, to a women's place in society, to the development of new technologies, I felt this time period really came to life within in the story. I really liked the way in which Faithful was written, and I was completely hooked with the story. I absolutely loved the setting. Having visited Yellowstone before, I felt Janet did a wonderful job describing what it must have looked like in 1904. The characters were all fascinating, and in-depth much like the story they're apart of. There's romance, adventure, deception, self-disovery and so much more. If you're a fan of historical fictions, I highly recommend picking up Faithful.

I'll be posting my review for Faithful's companion book, Forgiven along with an interview with Janet Fox shortly.

Clockwork Prince Jacket


Cassie recently shared what the jacket of Clockwork Prince is going to say and can I just say I don't know if I can wait until December to read this.....

In the magical underworld of Victorian London, Tessa Gray has at last found safety with the Shadowhunters. But that safety proves fleeting when rogue forces in the Clave plot to see her protector, Charlotte, replaced as head of the Institute. If Charlotte loses her position, Tessa will be out on the street—and easy prey for the mysterious Magister, who wants to use Tessa’s powers for his own dark ends.

With the help of the handsome, self-destructive Will and the fiercely devoted Jem, Tessa discovers that the Magister’s war on the Shadowhunters is deeply personal. He blames them for a long-ago tragedy that shattered his life. To unravel the secrets of the past, the trio journeys from mist-shrouded Yorkshire to a manor house that holds untold horrors, from the slums of London to an enchanted ballroom where Tessa discovers that the truth of her parentage is more sinister than she had imagined. When they encounter a clockwork demon bearing a warning for Will, they realize that the Magister himself knows their every move—and that one of their own has betrayed them.

Tessa finds her heart drawn more and more to Jem, but her longing for Will, despite his dark moods, continues to unsettle her. But something is changing in Will—the wall he has built around himself is crumbling. Could finding the Magister free Will from his secrets and give Tessa the answers about who she is and what she was born to do?

As their dangerous search for the Magister and the truth leads the friends into peril, Tessa learns that when love and lies are mixed, they can corrupt even the purest heart.

You can read our cover reveal post here and the Clockwork Prince chapter titles post here. You can pre-order the book at Amazon and on Simon & Schuster's site.

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