Long Live The Queen

I ordered this a long time ago, and yesterday it arrived.  It is a re-release of the Meg Powers series, which had a follow up published this past year.  I wasn’t going to sit down and read it but I started read a few pages and the next thing you know I was hooked.

Meg Powers’ mother is the President, which is something that Meg and her family have had to work very hard to adjust to, and they are trying to live as close to a normal life as possible when you reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.  But on a day when Meg is in a ridiculously good mood all notions of living normal fly out the window.  Meg is kidnapped in a violent and fatal couple minutes she is whisked away.

Meg’s captors, well captor, assures he is eventually going to kill her.  He beats her, and interestingly enough gets her drunk and has a conversation with her, and one day leaves her chained in a mine shaft to die.  I won’t spoil it any more except to say she doesn’t (or else there wouldn’t be a sequel).

The second half of the book is Meg’s recovery.

I already had an affection for Meg, and in this book she is more of an innocent, less hard.  Well, duh!!  But in a way reading backwards was a little sad because you see this girl she was before she was kidnapped, and you know who she is later.  You understand why but I think it is also clearer how totally fucked up she is from this kidnapping, although as I said after LMSR I don’t think she knows exactly how damaged she really is, there is a lot more for her to work out.

Meg is definitely a survivor, and not only physically.  She is sarcastic, and funny.  She hates crying in front of people and tries to hide it.  She may at times be a bot to much of a people pleaser in this book, but she grows out of that, so she can take care of herself.

Now I am not sure if I want to read the one before this . . .

PS: Also now that I have seen the re-release covers I get the LMSR cover but I still don’t like it.  I saw a bookstore recommendation at Bookshop Santa Cruz that started with Yes, it is that good, ignore the cover or something similar and I laughed aloud.

Long May She Reign

I resisted reading this for a while because I just could NOT GET PAST THE COVER, no matter how much anyone explained it to me. (Mona Lisa)

But despite what I felt was an icky cover, it sounded interesting. Meg, the President’s daughter is recovering from a kidnapping and brutal escape. And people I respected liked it so I read it.

It has been a long time since I took my time with a book, but I really did with this one. Partially because it was long – 720 pages, and partially because it was intense – Meg and her family really haven’t recovered, and partially because it moved slow in places which I ended up not minding at all. There are prequels to this that were published a while ago (1989) which I hadn’t read but they are being re-released and I am looking forward to at least the one in which she gets kidnapped. I liked Meg, she had a sense of humor but she is still pretty damaged, and not just physically and in the obvious ways, but in other not so obvious ways as well. In fact I am pretty sure she isn’t aware of all the ways she is messed up. She also isn’t really aware of how much of a survivor she is, navigating college as the President’s daughter, a paparazzi stalked celebrity, potential target of terrorists, and still in pain isn’t all that easy.

I really flew through the last 100 pages, we were on a trip and I read while my husband drove. Good thing there wasn’t anything interesting to look at, I wouldn’t have noticed.

Overall I enjoyed this, a little depressing but still good, and am looking forward to some earlier books.