Three Books I've Read Recently

Over the course of the last week, I finished reading three more books: Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King, Tamar by Mal Peet, and Otherland: City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams.  Here's my take on each of them:

***SLEEPING BEAUTIES by Stephen King and Owen King***
Stephen and Owen King's Sleeping Beauties came out just this past September. I got myself put on a holds list at my local public library and eventually checked it out .  It wasn't as good as most Stephen King novels, but the premise was intriguing.  All over the world, women and girls...even infants...are falling asleep and not waking up, with a web-like cocoon enveloping them.  Attempts to cut through the wrapping and revive them only result in them behaving murderously...and then falling back asleep.  A women's prison just outside a small Appalachian town becomes the test ground to see whether the women will return to consciousness in this world or humanity will grow extinct in a few decades without them.  One of that prison's inmates, Evie, seems to hold the key to it all. I found the explanation given at the end for all this to be vague and unsatisfactory, but I did get into the characters, like the psychiatrist Clint and the animal control officer Frank, who has a serious anger management problem.  Still, I didn't care at all for the ending and also felt that as a reader I was being talked down to with a patronizing lesson in political correctness: men: bad, women: good...

***TAMAR by Mal Peet***
Tamar is a 2005 young adult novel by Mal Peet.  I just happened to find it lying on a table in my house...no one seems to know where it came from.  Oh well, here's a book...might as well read it! And I'm glad I did.  The story goes back and forth between late World War II in Holland and England of 1995.  Tamar is a fifteen-year old girl whose grandfather, who had asked her father at her birth to give her that name, has just committed suicide.  With a box of clues he left her, she begins to investigate his past and travels, with her distant Dutch cousin Yoyo, along the Tamar River in southwestern England.  Meanwhile, the story flashes back to 1945 as two intelligence officers working for Britain, code-named Tamar and Dart, are dropped behind the lines in Holland to work for the Dutch resistance against Hitler's German occupation.  There's suspense, romance, and intrigue...but no, I'm not going to tell you what happens.  I was very satisfied with this tale, especially how it ended...

***OTHERLAND: CITY OF GOLDEN SHADOW by Tad Williams***
I first read the four-volume Otherland science fiction series by Tad Williams ten years ago and felt that it had a lot to say about our future and the promises...and dangers...that will come when virtual reality technology reaches its fruition.  The setting here is about a hundred years into the future.  The internet...and VR...has continued to develop and humanity across the planet is highly dependent on it.  Renie Sulawelo, a South African college instructor in the field, one day discovers that her little brother Stephen has gone into an inexplicable coma...she ties it in with a suspicious, forbidden site he had just visited with his friends in the virtual world.  As she keeps probing, the mystery deepens and she finds herself, her family, and fellow investigators pursued and attacked by a group with a very big secret to hide.  I loved this series for its very international cast of characters, especially the perceptive Bushman "!Xabbu", who has his own reasons for accompanying Renie into "Otherland".  I highly recommend this series, the first book of which came out before the movie The Matrix, which I suspect might have ripped off some of Otherland's ideas.  Read it for yourself and you'll see what I mean...