A siren must choose between the curse that defines her and a chance at love. Lexi is cursed. Following in the footsteps of every woman on her mother's side of the family, she's a siren whose song lures unsuspecting victims to their watery deaths. Each day she goes to school like a normal teenager, and each night she must swim to stay alive. Lexi wants desperately to be a normal girl, but she cuts herself off, becoming an ice queen to keep from hurting the people she cares about. Then she finds herself caught between a new boy at school who may have the power to melt her icy exterior and a handsome water spirit who says he can break Lexi's curse if she gives up everything else. Lexi is faced with the hardest decision of her life. Will she learn that love finds a way to overcome even the strongest of curses? Ripple is a sea-ravaged tale of melancholy beauty, and the choices one girl makes between land and waves, love and freedom, her future--and her heart.

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Lexi seems like your average teen, aside from one major difference: at night she transforms into a sea siren trapped by one seriously awful curse --- either she must lure men to their deaths or be left in unbearable pain herself. Not wanting to be the cause of anyone's death, Lexi isolates herself from the rest of the world as much as possible. Each night she swims in a hidden lake instead of the ocean. If she doesn't swim every day, she becomes feverish, experiences muscle cramps / a knotted up stomach, or the sensation of shards of glass in her skin.

A lonely life, but she's making it work... until the day she meets Cole, the best friend of the last guy she let herself love...and accidentally kill.There's also Erik, a new student at Lexi's high school who acts as if he knows her secret. Oh, and then there's Sienna, Lexi's once best friend and sister of Steven (that last love of Lexi's... bit of crimp in a friendship, I imagine) who turns out to be a pretty terrible person no one in their right mind would want to continue a friendship with. 

I was really digging the first 3/4ths of this story! The writing isn't always top notch (there was one line that read "there's so many holes in my plan it's like I wrote it down on Swiss cheese" that got an eyeroll out of me) but the plot is fun. It's a YA novel, so some level of teen angst can be expected, but for the most part the characters were decently developed enough to keep me invested. That last 1/4 though... there was a distinct shift. The interactions between Lexi, Cole and Erik start veering into over-the-top melodrama.

I liked the siren theme, just wished it would have been referenced more, a little more sea legend vibe worked in. It is there, but the bulk of this leans on just average teen romance / drama / backstabbing. As long as you don't go in expecting too much, it's a perfectly entertaining beach read! 

"Anyone can see you have a wall bigger than the one in China. You're just kind of ... unapproachable. It's not like someone can catch your eye and smile if you're constantly looking down at the ground. And it felt like to talk to you directly was to risk going down in flames."

 

I blink. I guess I never realized just how effective I've been at keeping people at arm's length. 

 

He turns to look at me, and with how close we're sitting, our noses are just inches apart. His voice lowers. "But I guess you're worth the risk." He leans in slowly, and I close my eyes. 

Once finished, I had this feeling like maybe the book as a whole suffered from being a little too short? Or perhaps that was intentional? There were parts of the plot I would've liked to have seen developed a little further, but on the other hand, having that sensation of not knowing more about the characters (their history and such) in a way does work with where Hubbard decides to drop the closing curtain. 

One of the joys of reading on a Kindle (or, in my case, a Kindle app) is the ease of bookmarking.  As one indication of how important I found Alec Nevala-Lee's Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, I bookmarked it ten times more than any other book I've read in the past few years.  (The runners-up are The Perversity of Things: Hugo Gernsback on Media, Tinkering, and Scientifiction by Grant Wythoff and Dreaming the Beatles by Rob Sheffield, though I read those two on paper.)

It's no surprise (at least to me) that Astounding had much more of an impact on me - a transformative impact - than The Perversity of Things.  I knew neither Gernsback or Campbell in person, or by any means other than their published writing.  In contrast, I knew and worked with Isaac Asimov, the high point of which was getting him to write a Preface for my first published book, In Pursuit of Truth: Essays on the Philosophy of Karl Popper in 1982.  It was a collection of essays (I contributed one) of which I was the Editor, and I didn't have to work very hard to get Asimov to write the Preface: we already knew each other (I'd sent him my analysis of the Foundation trilogy published a few years earlier in Media and Methods - here's his postcard response - and he quickly accepted Humanity Press's not overly generous offer of $100 to write the Preface for the Popper volume).  And, as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1998-2001, and as a science fiction writer myself, I also knew or still know many of the secondary players in Astounding, including Harlan Ellison, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, Robert Silverberg, Sam Delany (I first heard about him from his mother Ruth, in the mid-1960s, in the George Bruce Branch Library in Harlem where she worked as a librarian and I as a clerk),  Ray Bradbury, David Kyle, Barry Malzberg, Greg Benford, Joe Haldeman, Janet (Jeppson) Asimov, and many others.  So seeing them in these pages was a tour through many significant conversations and interactions I've had in my own life.

And on being a science fiction writer myself, Nevala-Lee's book also tapped into another profound wellspring of my career:  I've been published in Analog 17 times (15 stories and 2 nonfiction articles - one story acquired by Trevor Quachri, all the rest by Stan Schmidt), and am a card-carrying member (well, pin-affixed) of the Analog Mafia.  Stan's editing philosophy continued the best of Campbell's.  In my case, for example, Stan urged me to not kill off Phil D'Amato (which I had in the first draft of "The Chronology Protection Case"), just as Campbell had urged Frank Herbert not to kill Alia in Dune, one of a plethora of winning details that Nevala-Lee puts in this book.  "The Chronology Protection Case" was made into a short movie, now on Amazon Prime, and Phil D'Amato's appearance in my first novel, The Silk Code, won a Locus Award for Best First Novel of 1999.

Ok, so I love Nevala-Lee's book.  But what about people without my professional history?  I can't say for sure, but I would bet that any science fiction writer, as well as any science fiction fan, would find this book riveting, and a treasure trove of context-setting scenes.   What follows, in rough order of their appearance in the book, are some of the highlights for me:

1. I knew that Paul Krugman was influenced by the Foundation stories, but not Elon Musk.  Given the latter's age, I wonder if he was reading Analog in the mid-late 1990s, when my stories first started appearing in its pages.

2. Campbell, as a kid, kept a garter snake in his pocket.  I wonder if Stan Schmidt, who had pet snakes, knew about this.

3. I was fascinated to learn that Campbell's favorite professor at MIT was Norbert Wiener.  I studied Wiener's Cybernetics when earning my PhD in Media Ecology under Neil Postman at NYU in the late 1970s.  Cyberneticsalso appears later in the book in its extensive discussion of dianetics - the least favorite part, for me, because I never related to Hubbard, dianetics, or Scientology, but it's an important part of the Campbell story.

4. It turns out that Campbell, like Gernsback, was in effect a media ecologist, presaging the kind of thinking that Marshall McLuhan made famous, by observing that unlike radio, television was very possessive, "you have to look at it," and "Man molded the machine, but the machine is going to mold Man". This difference between radio and television played a crucial role in my doctoral dissertation, Human Replay: A Theory of the Evolution of Media, and I often say that radio amply survived the advent of television if for no other reason than you can listen to radio, but can't (safely) watch television, when driving.  I'm grateful to Nevala-Lee for alerting me that Campbell made this point back in the 1930s.

5.  One thing I do have in common with L. Ron Hubbard: he was elected President of the NY chapter of the American Fiction Guild in 1935.  As I already mentioned, I was President of SFWA at the end of the 20th century.   That, and later being Chair of the Department of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University in NYC, convinced me that elected office was no pleasure, and indeed took too much time away from writing.

6. A lot of the material about Asimov comes from his two-part autobiography, In Memory Yet Green and In Joy Still Felt, which I devoured as soon as they were published (1979, 1980).  But it was fun to read it all again - ranging from Asimov getting $64 for his first sale, "Marooned Off Vesta," to Amazing Stories not Astounding (my first sale of a science fiction story to a professional publication was also to Amazing Stories - "Albert's Cradle" in 1993 - and the first payment I ever received for any writing was $65 from The Village Voice for "A Vote for McCartney" in 1971) - to Campbell continually coming up with essential ideas for both the Foundation and the robot stories.   (I should also mention that, like Asimov, I have no intention of ever writing under any name other than my own.  Except Asimov eventually did, and I won't.  I want the girl who didn't laugh at my jokes in 5th grade to see the error of her ways when she walks into a bookstore - or, in today's world, when she's browsing on Amazon.)  And it was enlightening to read material about Asimov from other sources that I didn't know.

7.  I also studied General Semantics in the NYU Media Ecology PhD program.  I still give talks at some of their meetings, and therefore enjoyed Nevala-Lee's recounting of Heinlein's interest in the subject and movement.

8.  I do have something else in common with Hubbard:  when a potential recommender invited Hubbard to write the recommendation himself, Hubbard obliged with "This will introduce one of the most brilliant men I have ever known."  A reviewer once asked me to write a review of one of my stories, because he was pressed for time.  I did, and said it was the best example of this kind of story ever written.  I sent it to the reviewer for his approval and he decided to write his own review, after all.

9. It was great reading about Campbell's launching of the Probability Zero section.  That was where I had my first publication in Analog, in February 1995.

10.  Campbell and Nevala-Lee repeatedly refer to Heinlein as Astounding's (and science fiction's) best writer (until Asimov's The God Themselves in 1972, when Nevala-Lee says Asimov "finally pulled ahead" of Heinlein).  I disagree: Asimov was almost always the best science fiction writer, by virtue of his Foundation stories (at least, beginning with "The Mule" in 1945), his robot stories, and The End of Eternity for good measure.  But Heinlein was second, with no one even close behind him, until Philip K. Dick (who I learned in Nevala-Lee's book was published in Astounding/Analog only once).

11. I love this quote from S. I. Hayakawa: "The art [of science fiction] consists in concealing from the reader, for novelistic purposes, the distinctions between established scientific facts, almost-established scientific hypotheses, scientific conjectures, and imaginative extrapolations," from ETC, 1951. I was book editor of that journal in the late 1970s.

12. Nevala-Lee provides many examples of Campbell's astute - and not-so-astute - scientific thinking.  I'd say that his most accurate was his anticipation of the hydrogen bomb.

13. I hadn't known that Claude Shannon - co-creator of the Shannon-Weaver model of communications, fundamental to any study of the subject - was a neighbor of Campbell in New Jersey!

14. Nevala-Lee should have said more about The Puppet Masters (1951) - one of Heinlein's best novels, one of the best science fiction novels, period, and of which a good movie has yet to be made (unlike Starship Troopers).

15. I don't blame Asimov for long resisting acquiring an agent.  I've had mixed results with agents over the years myself.

16. I also loved learning that Campbell sent Heinlein a Tom Lehrer record as a "peace offering" after an argument (they would "never fully reconcile").

17.  I'm with Heinlein not Asimov in Heinlein's bristling at editors' instructions and revisions.

18. Heinlein's The Door Into Summer (1956) indeed ranks among his best work - and I'd say among the all-time best time-travel novels - but it comes in second, again, in my opinion, to Asimov's The End of Eternity, published a year earlier.  (Nevala does say that it's Asimov's "best single novel".  He doesn't say if Heinlein was moved to write his novel after reading Asimov's.)

19.  Campbell's rejection of Asimov's "Ugly Little Boy" was one of his worst mistakes - the story is one of Asimov's very best (and, as Nevala-Lee tells us, one of Asimov's favorites).

20. The material about Charles Manson being inspired by Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land strikes me as the same as Manson being inspired by the Beatles' Helter Skelter:  you can't blame a creator for what a lunatic gets out of the creator's work.

21. Apropos the mention of Marvin Minsky:  I should add that he's also on record as saying his work in AI was triggered by Asimov's robot stories.

22. Campbell's racism in the 1960s was indeed repugnant, as Nevala-Lee says, not to mention his critique of the demonstrators at Kent State in 1970.  Silverberg was right not to want to work him after the racism became apparent.

23.  I was (sadly) reminded that Mitt Romney said Hubbard's Battleship Earth was his "favorite novel".  Back in June 2007, that was one of ten reasons which led me to wonder if Mitt Romney was a cylon.

So there you have it - a sampling of the gems Nevala-Lee's book offers.  If you have any interest in science fiction, let alone knowledge of its history and authors, you'll find this book indispensable.  And, if you've ever written any science fiction, maybe transformative, too.  It had that exhilarating effect on me, because it made clear that what little I've done as a science fiction writer is tied to a genre, a tradition, that propelled us, and lit up our lives, in the 20th century, and still does.

A wonderfully lyrical walk through the untamed south west coast of Ireland at the daily mercy of the wild unpredictable Atlantic ocean. Martha Cassidy has returned to the cottage that she and her deceased husband Brendan owned and spent many happy years. She is trying to finalize Brendan's affairs before deciding if she wishes to stay or sell the cottage. Through her eyes we meet unscrupulous property dealer Eugene Riordan eager to woo Martha as he is hoping to acquire her property for his future development plans.

Sue Hubbard uses the landscape as a descriptive backdrop to her flowing narrative style...."This is the end of the world with nothing between her and America except the cold sea"....."She's not religious. For her death is the end A soundless dark beyond time and sleep"....."Our lives are so hectic that not to be busy is considered a modern vice, evidence of inadequacy, proof that we're no longer important."......"to find a landscape to fit our dreams and disappointments. When there's nothing left there's still the ocean and the sky"....."Were they too, running from intimacy in order to avoid love's vulnerability"......There are a number of surprises that unfold as we delve deeper into Martha's regretful past, and a new acquaintance that she unexpectedly meets during her stay. Will she decide to remain or return to her old life in London. In the quiet moments of this breathtakingly beautiful location old memories return and with them a great sadness...A very enjoyable read that brought the beautiful location of Southern Ireland to life. Highly recommended.

Christine and her sisters Mattie and Rosetta sold their farms to but Promise Lodge and start a new community, a community that spousal abuse wasn’t tolerated and peace was the promise of living there.  Christine was at her sister Mattie’s wedding and Christine was happy for Maddie especially with getting a second chance at love with her husband. Christine was very attracted to Bishop Monroe Burkholder and she hoped he was just as attracted to her. Christine s a widow with two daughters who were young women. Christine was Amish as were all the people at Promise Lodge. Monroe asked Christine if he could spend the day with her and he had some important decisions he wanted to discuss with Christine. Monroe’s preachers for hsi people were Eli and Amos who was now Christine's brother in law. But Amos had some doubts about the new Bishop and after awhile Monroe would go to Amos about his doubts. Christine was a widow for two years and two daughters who were now young women- Laura and Phoebe.

I couldn’t really get into this book. I usually love a good Amish novel. I just couldn’t connect with the characters. This didn’t hold my interest like most Amish novels do. I am sure others will love this. It just wasn’t for me.

I am a huge Charlotte Hubbard fan, I have been reading her books for a few years now which is kind of shocking being as my go to genre is paranormal. Charlotte doesn't need any hosts or ghouls to bring her fascinating tales of Amish families to life. This book is the my favorite so far of all of her books I have read, and I have loved them all. As a Stepmom myself I can relate to some of this of this book, and enjoyed all of this book. Perfect book with Mother's Day just around the corner.

The book is about Leah Otto, a real Tomboy. Instead of learning to cook and sew like most Amish girls, Leah helped her father with the farm animals. When she was about 13 she goes with her father to auctions and she meets Jude Shetler who is calling the action.

Years later Jude is a widower with 3 children. He has twin 16 year old girls and a 5 year old boy. Jude and Leah fall in love and decide to marry. Both of their families do not believe this to be a good idea, and the night before the wedding tell each of them their thoughts on the marriage. But they go through with it anyway.

Once married the twins really test Leah to the point after just a few months Leah is just miserable. She has kept all the things the girls have done to her over the past few months to herself, but at her wits end tells Jude she cannot live with him anymore. Jude unlike a lot of men steps in to keep his family together.

This is not just a case of telling the girl to be nice to their new step mom. It goes way further then that. Already acting out and dating English men the girls over hear Jude tell Leah that he is not their biological father.

While trying to get their little family straightened out. One night they hear a car pull up then leave, then a cry of a baby. Someone has left a tiny baby on their porch. Leah now has to decide how she can make them all a family.