“In most fairy tales, princesses are beautiful, dragons are terrifying, and stories are harmless. This isn’t most fairy tales.”

What a terrible, transformative, true (in the best sense of the word) book.

Iron Hearted Violet is a story about an ugly but beloved princess who lives in a “mirrored world” where for time immemorial the thirteenth-god-who-is-never-named-aloud has been imprisoned for the protection of the multiverse from his destructive and evil tendencies. However, Violet’s world, and indeed the entire multiverse, created by the other twelve gods, is in imminent danger of being taken over by the evil Nybbas (who should never be named).

It’s a story about sin and pride and the desire for power and worship of ourselves and also about love and loyalty and true beauty. The book dares to say things that are counter-cultural and also run counter to the usual fantasy tale tropes:

“There are other ways to be brave without demonstrating it with the sword. Most battles are won by changing minds and turning hearts. Sometimes that’s all the bravery you need.”

“A real princess engages with the world in a state of grace. It is with grace that she listens and with grace that she speaks. A princess loves her people, no matter what their birth or station. Even ugly jailers.”

“Love [is] sharp and hot and dangerous. . . Love transforms our fragile, cowardly hearts into hearts of stone, hearts of blade, hearts of hardest iron. Because love makes heroes of us all.”

This book has a “Hobbit feel” to it, not in the plot or the characters (although there is a dragon), but in the flow of the story and in its moral universe and in its message. Small, unlovely things and people can have great significance. In fact, an ugly princess and her stable-boy best friend and an old, fear-filled dragon might be both the betrayers and the saviors of the world.

Two things I didn’t like about the book:
1. The pictures of Violet in the beginning of the book and on the cover, where she is supposed to be ugly, show a cute little girl with beautiful curly hair and lovely features. She is described:

“Her left eye was visibly larger than her right. . . Her nose pugged, her forehead was too tall, and even when she was just a baby, her skin was freckled and blotched, and no number of milk baths or lemon rubs could unmark her. People remarked about her lack of beauty.”

Just as it happens in the story itself when the storyteller/narrator tells Violet to make her story princesses beautiful to please the listeners, the illustrator (or someone) couldn’t resist making Violet pretty instead of showing her in all her asymmetrical, wild, and unattractive glory.

2. The impotence and limited-ness of “the gods.” There are twelve gods in this story who are said to have created the multiverse and saved it from deadly peril, but are now remote, removed and “still learning.” These gods are not omnipotent, not omniscient, and actually rather like benevolent gods of a clockwork multiverse, set in motion and left to function on its own. One of the gods, the “runty god”, does intervene but in a rather ineffective way.

Nevertheless, those two failings are outweighed by far by the lovely story-telling and surprising plot developments and outstanding characters and themes of Iron Hearted Violet. I recommend it for lovers of fantasy and princess books.

Yawn.

I really like Diane Stanley’s beautifully written and illustrated picture book biographies of famous historical figures such as Joan of Arc, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Peter the Great and others. And Brown Bear Daughter and I both enjoyed her fairy tale fantasy Cinderella story, Bella at Midnight. But The Cup and the Crown, a sequel to The Silver Bowl (which I haven’t read), just wasn’t up to snuff in comparison to the biographies or to Bella.

Molly’s friend King Alaric asks her to find a Loving Cup for him, a magical cup with the “power to bind two souls together for life, to bless their children and their children’s children down through the generations.” He needs the cup to make a neighboring princess fall in love with him and thereby gain a strategic alliance for the kingdom. Strike one against this story. I didn’t care if Molly ever found the cup or not, given the rather mercenary purpose of her quest.

Molly, accompanied by several friends and companions, travels to the north in search of the cup, and lead by a magical raven, they discover a hidden city where no one is allowed to enter lest they give the secret location of the rich and powerful city of Harrowsgode. But Molly is allowed in by an inhabitant who should know better, and then she is imprisoned so that she can never leave and give away the secret. Strike two. Why did Master Pieter let Molly in? Even more to the point, why did Master Pieter let her friend Tobias in when he knew that Tobias’ life would be forfeit?

Then, by hard work and a little magic, Molly and Tobias manage to escape, someone makes them a Loving Cup, and they all live happily ever after—maybe. Strike three. I made it all the way through the book, but I was not rewarded with a very satisfying ending. I think there’s a third book in the series yet to come.

Do you know that game where you sit in a circle and tell a story, each person breaking off at a critical moment to let the next person add to the story? This book felt like that kind of round robin story, only incorporating two stories in alternating chapters instead of just one. Maybe imagine two concentric circles and the story-telling, of two separate stories, goes around the circles in opposite directions–nah, that’s too confusing.

Wendy Mass wrote 11 Birthdays and Finally, two books I really liked. And she’s written some other fairy tale take-offs in the Twice Upon a Time series that includes this version of Beauty and the Beast. I haven’t read the others in the series, but I just couldn’t enjoy this one very much. I kept wondering when the “Beauty” chapters and the “Beast” chapters were going to converge, and then when they finally did about three-fourths of the way through the book, I just didn’t believe.

SPOILER, I guess. We have a wicked witch in this story who turns people into insects (and other animals). The insects, an ant and a grasshopper, then live for many, many years. I looked it up. Ants and grasshoppers don’t live that long, although I suppose enchanted insects could be different.

Tag line: The story of Beauty and the Beast like you’ve never heard it before.

That’s a true statement, but my problem is that I liked the way I heard it before better.
There’s Beauty or Rose Daughter both by Robin McKinley or Beast by Donna Jo Napoli or even the Disney movie of the story. This version just feels impromptu and implausible.

Other voices:
It didn’t work for Charlotte either.
Angie at Bibliophile Support Group was bored.
I didn’t find any other reviews. If you have a different take, please let us know in the comments.

Geeks, Girls, and Secret Identities is a parody of super-hero comics and books and movies. In Copperplate City, Captain Stupendous is a fact of life, a very helpful and convenient fact of life. He’s the reason there haven’t been any abductions in Copperplate City in the last twenty-some odd years.
Captain Stupendous always, always shows up whenever any Super-Villain tries to take over the world or wreak havoc in the streets. And as president of the real Captain Stupendous Fan Club, Vincent Wu is the person who knows more about Captain Stupendous than anyone else in Copperplate City.

Several things annoyed me about this tale of a geeky super-hero fan club and the super hero they are sworn to adulate:

First of all, the boys in the fan club and other characters in the book have a tendency to YELL A LOT, INDICATED BY DIALOG WRITTEN IN ALL-CAPS. This typographical convention is not something I want to encourage in the writing and publishing of children’s books.

Secondly, there is a fair amount of barfing and burping and farting and freaking and sucking going on in the pages of this super-hero obsessed story, and since I’m not an eleven year old boy I could have done without all of that nonsense. I mean, you know, the book didn’t totally suck or make me barf or freak me out. It just felt as if the author said to himself, “Boys like to talk about barfing and farting, so I’ll put lots of that in here.” Yuck.

Third, I found the boys in the story–Vincent , Max, and George–just generally annoying. They picked at each other a lot, and I hear enough of that around my house with three teenagers in the family. Putdowns and insults ceased to make me laugh long ago. And Polly, the main girl character, wasn’t much better. She’s very concerned that the boys all realize that she knows karate and can kick bu– with the best of them. Again yuck.

Maybe it just wasn’t the right time, or I wasn’t in the right mood for the geeky, slangy kind of humor.

I liked the Oxford comma in the title.

This book is for all those fans of graphology, the study of handwriting. If you have one in your life, Signed by Zelda is the book. Lucy, the female protagonist of the story, is nearly obsessed with handwriting. She gathers handwriting samples wherever she goes. She looks up samples of famous signatures on the internet. She knows how to tell if a signature is a forgery. She even knows how to forge signatures herself, but she’s still working on being able to replicate John Hancock’s signature.

However, the book is only partly about Lucy and her interest in graphology. It’s also about Nicky, the boy who lives in the apartment above Lucy’s and is always in time-out, sent there by his shouting and uncaring dad. (Mom absconded to India.) And it’s about Pigeon, a talking, pie-eating pigeon, and Grandma Zelda, who’s Nicky’s sometimes forgetful but excellent pie-making grandmother. Grandma Zelda’s specialty is Zeldaberry pies (recipe in the back of the book).

When Grandma Zelda disappears, Nicky, Lucy and Pigeon band together to find her. This final third of the book is both the best and the weakest part of the story. It’s best because we finally get to see the three friends working together to solve a problem, the disappearance of Grandma Zelda. But it’s the weakest because Nicky’s dad, the person responsible for Grandma’s vanishing, was just too bad for his eventual “redemption” to be believable. He’s bad, bad, bad, all through the book; then he apologizes and everything is fine. (Not a spoiler. It’s pretty obvious throughout the book who the bad guy is and what his nefarious plan is.)

Signed by Zelda is quirky, sort of a stretch on the believability scale, and a delight for anyone who’s a fan of handwriting analysis–or pigeons. Lucy even has rules, called LUCY’S WRITING RULES:

LWR #1: Watch your back around paper stabbers.
LWR #2: Confused people have confused writing.
LWR #3: Real friends write with real letters.
LWR #4: You are your I.
LWR #5: Every signature has a secret.

Context is everything, and you would probably have to read the book to get the full significance of Lucy’s Writing Rules. I just wonder what Lucy would make of my signature?

More steam-punk, time travel, kids-save-the-world with a dose of zombies, pirates, and intrepid explorers thrown in for good measure. Shake it all together, and you have an adventure story that answers the eternal question: “Should you be afraid of dark closets and basements and monsters under the bed at night?” (The answer, of course, is a resounding “YES!”)

Tommy is a nineteenth century Dickensian London street urchin who is recruited to join the Explorers’ Society, a group of men devoted to exploring portals to other worlds. Jezebel Lemon is a twenty-first century schoolgirl who lives in a New York apartment with her dad, an artist. When Tommy and Jez become partners, they have to find a way to save the world from the un-dead, Dead Gentleman.

I liked the friendship aspect of this story. What does it take to make people friends?What if a friend betrays you? What do friends do to balance each other and compensate for the other’s weaknesses? Tommy is a bit rash, rushing in where others fear to tread; Jez is more cautious, but she approaches bold and daring by the end of the novel. Then there’s also Bernard, another friend and ally who’s super-cautious, but loyal. The friends complement one another.

I didn’t much like the villains of the piece, not that you’re supposed to like villains. The Dead Gentleman and his henchman Macheath are a little too nefarious and mustache-twirling to be believed. However, each to his own villains, I suppose.

For middle grade steam-punk adventure fans, The Dead Gentleman is a solid entry in the genre. Recommended on the back cover by Pseudonymous Bosch.