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A review by heatheray
Crane by Stacey Rourke
5.0
The first time I saw Crane was in a giveaway on Facebook. I threw my name in the hat because that cover is awesome. I won that giveaway! I didn’t have a book on tour for today so I skipped it ahead of all the books I have bought and dived in yesterday.
It turns out I don’t just love fairy tales retold, I love legends retold also. Crane is awesome. Ireland is hilarious from the get go. She has the best retorts to just about anything anyone could say to her. I adored her as a character and I loved how she interacted with all of the other characters.
I loved all of the men in the book in the roles they played: Ichabod Crane, Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, and Noah. They all had me laughing at some point.
So you now know there is humor and sarcasm, and just quick wit throughout the book. What else is there?
It is creepy.
Seriously creepy.
I loved that.
Crane kept me on my toes as I was reading the moments from in the past and jumping to the future. It was dark and foreboding at times. I read this in one day and did not want to put it down. My kids wanted to go outside to play and I was groaning inside because mama wanted her book. I took it out with me and snuck in a few pages here and there in between making sure bike helmets were on and nobody was breaking the neighbor’s window with a soccer ball. (I actually failed at that part, but it wasn’t one of my kids, it was our soccer ball though. I feel bad.) Then at bedtime I was at 60%. I put my kids to bed and finished the book.
The only thing that bothered me, and this is incredibly technical, probably flat out picky, and does not effect my rating (5 stars) at all because I loved this book so much, was when I was reading along in the past and one of the characters mentioned the words “Wiccan education”. It jarred me back to reality for a moment. I am obsessed with why people believe what they believe. I have spent a lot of time reading/studying different religions, (I am not an expert by any means) including Wicca. Washington Irving lived during the late 1700s to the mid 1800s. He published his works about Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane in 1819/1820. When the book is speaking in the past, I assumed that they were living in a time before those works were written, and more specifically, all 3 men had served in the Revolutionary War which was from 1775-1783, so after that time period.
The people we credit with using the word the way we do now are Gerald B. Gardner who wasn’t born until 1884 and Doreen Valiente who was born in 1922, both after the time period set in the book.
Wicca, in the way we use it now, referring to the pagan religion, has been traced back to the 1960s. The term Wica (an apparent misspelling) has been traced back to the 1950s. It did however come from the Old English term wicca (male witch) and wicce (female), so maybe that is why it was used in this sentence? I would think back in the early 1800s they would have used the term witchcraft or sorcery. It is such a modern term that it just bumped me out of that place you go when you are immersed in an amazing book, it took me a moment to get my reading groove back on.
There is my über technical technical difficulty that I had over 2 words out of almost 300 pages. Don’t ask me why those 2 words bothered me enough to highlight and make sure that I had my facts straight on the timeline, but I just had to.
Amazingly creepy retelling of the headless horseman and I cannot wait to read the next book in the series Raven! If it is listed on Goodreads, it is going on my TBR now. I am dying to know what they find out in NY!
It turns out I don’t just love fairy tales retold, I love legends retold also. Crane is awesome. Ireland is hilarious from the get go. She has the best retorts to just about anything anyone could say to her. I adored her as a character and I loved how she interacted with all of the other characters.
I loved all of the men in the book in the roles they played: Ichabod Crane, Washington Irving, Rip Van Winkle, and Noah. They all had me laughing at some point.
So you now know there is humor and sarcasm, and just quick wit throughout the book. What else is there?
It is creepy.
Seriously creepy.
I loved that.
Crane kept me on my toes as I was reading the moments from in the past and jumping to the future. It was dark and foreboding at times. I read this in one day and did not want to put it down. My kids wanted to go outside to play and I was groaning inside because mama wanted her book. I took it out with me and snuck in a few pages here and there in between making sure bike helmets were on and nobody was breaking the neighbor’s window with a soccer ball. (I actually failed at that part, but it wasn’t one of my kids, it was our soccer ball though. I feel bad.) Then at bedtime I was at 60%. I put my kids to bed and finished the book.
The only thing that bothered me, and this is incredibly technical, probably flat out picky, and does not effect my rating (5 stars) at all because I loved this book so much, was when I was reading along in the past and one of the characters mentioned the words “Wiccan education”. It jarred me back to reality for a moment. I am obsessed with why people believe what they believe. I have spent a lot of time reading/studying different religions, (I am not an expert by any means) including Wicca. Washington Irving lived during the late 1700s to the mid 1800s. He published his works about Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane in 1819/1820. When the book is speaking in the past, I assumed that they were living in a time before those works were written, and more specifically, all 3 men had served in the Revolutionary War which was from 1775-1783, so after that time period.
The people we credit with using the word the way we do now are Gerald B. Gardner who wasn’t born until 1884 and Doreen Valiente who was born in 1922, both after the time period set in the book.
Wicca, in the way we use it now, referring to the pagan religion, has been traced back to the 1960s. The term Wica (an apparent misspelling) has been traced back to the 1950s. It did however come from the Old English term wicca (male witch) and wicce (female), so maybe that is why it was used in this sentence? I would think back in the early 1800s they would have used the term witchcraft or sorcery. It is such a modern term that it just bumped me out of that place you go when you are immersed in an amazing book, it took me a moment to get my reading groove back on.
There is my über technical technical difficulty that I had over 2 words out of almost 300 pages. Don’t ask me why those 2 words bothered me enough to highlight and make sure that I had my facts straight on the timeline, but I just had to.
Amazingly creepy retelling of the headless horseman and I cannot wait to read the next book in the series Raven! If it is listed on Goodreads, it is going on my TBR now. I am dying to know what they find out in NY!