RTW #119: Best Book of February

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

We'd love for you to participate! Just answer the prompt on your own blog and leave a link - or, if you prefer, you can include your answer in the comments.

This Week's Topic:What was the best book you read in February?Road Trip Song of the Week:


I'm glad YA Highway and Suze Reese are doing these blog carnivals, since I rarely seem to post unless someone gives me a prompt to write on. This one turned out to be easy, since as it happens I finished seven books in February. Not that I read them all in the course of the month, of course: I usually have about four books going, and finish them whenever I finish them. The ones I finished this month, in chronological order, were:

1. The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy: 2010 (ed. Rich Horton).
2. Death Comes to Pemberley, by P.D. James
3. The Stranger Beside Me, by Ann Rule
4. Sinful in Satin, by Madeline Hunter
5. Pirate King, by Laurie R. King
6. Anna Dressed in Blood, by Kendare Blake
7. The Hinge Factor, by Eric Durschmied

Most of these were really good, so the decision is a bit harder than it was last month. In the end, I'd call it a toss-up between Anna Dressed in Blood and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy.

Anna Dressed in Blood is a young adult horror/romance novel. The protagonist, a boy named Cas, believes that it's his destiny to travel the world destroying murderous ghosts with the athame he inherited from his father. In this novel he meets the titular Anna, the super-strong ghost of a teenaged murder victim, who has filled her old house with the souls of a veritable legion of unfortunate trespassers. She's stronger, faster, and smarter than any other ghost he's ever encountered-- and, of course, when he goes to kill her he 1) fails and 2) falls head-over-heels in love with her. 

I read Anna for a young-adult book club I joined recently, and all of us loved it. Even the ladies who profess to dislike genre books in general thought this one was terrific. I also thought it was quite scary, though apparently there were mixed opinions about that. If you pick it up-- and I hope you do!-- it's best to read it slowly, without skimming or skipping around to see what's next. (You wouldn't fast-forward through a horror movie, would you?) Let the creepitude enfold you. Enjoy the twists as they appear-- most of them I didn't see coming at all, and the climax came as a (fantastically) nasty shock. This is also the first volume in a series, so there's more to look forward to after you finish it.

The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy is, of course, a book of an entirely different color. I was really impressed by the overall quality of the material. A lot of times I've picked up genre anthologies and been disappointed by the inconsistency of the contents (one or two great stories mixed in with several that... needed work). This one does not have this problem. Most of the writers involved are incredibly talented, and out of about thirty stories there were only two or three that didn't really float my boat. There's also a good gender balance, which is unfortunately unusual in anthologies like this. 


The stories that really stood out for me were Ann Leckie's "The Endangered Camp," Jo Walton's "Three Twilight Tales," Robert Charles Wilson's "This Peaceable Land," Rachel Swirsky's "Eros, Philia, Agape," Damien Broderick's "The Qualia Engine," Catherynne M. Valente's "The Radiant Car Thy Sparrows Drew," Sarah Monette's & Elizabeth Bear's "Mongoose," Toiya Kristen Finley's "The Death of Sugar Daddy," and Kelly Link's "Secret Identity." Other people would probably have different favorites. Oddly, the Goodreads ratings aren't nearly as high as I would expect, and several people commented that they weren't best pleased with the sci fi, so I guess if you're mostly a fan of hard sci-fi it won't really float your boat. I loved it, however, and have the 2011 volume waiting on my shelf.


I've been trying to be very serious about my reading, and to treat it as part of my job. I really can't write at all if I'm not reading a lot, and of course stories are where stories come from. I could probably go for a couple of years just on the unread books currently waiting on my shelves, so I kind of wish I were a faster reader and/or had more hours in a day, but so far this has been a pretty good year for books. Here's hoping March is even better!