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Whatever After: Fairest of All by Sarah Mlynowski

Nov14

Abby and her family have moved to a new town, Smithville, and things in this new place are just not right! For instance:

1. Everyone in Smithville calls Coke, Pepsi, and Orange Crush soda. Pop is a much better name. Pop! Pop! Pop! Coke pops on your tongue. It doesn’t soda on your tongue.
2. The people here do not know how to make a peanut butter and banana sandwich. The right way is to slice the banana up and then press the slices one by one into the peanut butter, preferably in neat and orderly rows. But the kids in my new school mash the bananas, mix a spoonful of peanut butter into the mashed bananas and then spread the whole gloppy mess on their bread. Why oh why would they do that?
3. And now instead of tag they want to play freeze tag, or “Ooo, Let’s All Be Frozen Statues While Abby Runs Around and Around and Around.”

Abby is in need of an escape, and she goes to the library for a dose of fairy tale reality. “No matter how many times you read them, stories always stay the same.” However, maybe not. What if Abby herself causes the fairy tale to change and messes up the happy ending?

This fairy tale reworking is definitely for the younger end of middle grade readers, ages 6 to 10 or so. The narrator, Abby, is ten years old, and a young ten at that. When she and her younger brother Jonah are transported by a magic mirror in the basement of their new house into the fairy tale world, their reactions and plans are definitely childlike. Older readers might scorn these babes in the woods and their rather unsophisticated strategies for “fixing” Snow White’s story, but younger readers could have a lot of fun with Abby and Jonah and their fairy tale adventure. I found the story cute and refreshing after the pseudo-sophistication of so many middle grade fantasies dealing with heavy, heavy themes and events.

There’s a second book in the series due out in January 2013, called Whatever After #2: If the Shoe Fits.

The Brightworking by Paul B. Thompson

Nov13

Mikal, a blacksmith’s son, is chosen in The Gleaning to become a servant to the sorcerers at the Guild of Constant Working in the capital city of Oranbold. Unfortunately, the children who have been taken in The Gleaning are attacked by Night-gaunts on the way to Oranbold. Fortunately, Mikal finds that he has a special ability to evade magical spells. Unfortunately, a girl named Lyra tricks him on his first night in the guildhall. Fortunately, Lyra becomes a resourceful and loyal friend. Unfortunately, she’s also dirty, “not entirely brave, not entirely trustworthy.”

I could go on, but you get the picture. Mika survives the vicissitudes of life in a city where the wizards of the Guild are fighting each other for power and influence. He gains the friendship and help of both Lyra and of a clockwork talking head named Orrichalkon. The sequels in The Brightstone Saga are to be titled: Book II, The Fortune-Teller January, 2013) and Book III, The Battle for Brightstone (2013).

Other voices:
For Those About to Mock: “This book seems designed with reluctant readers in mind, from the conceptual level down to the simple, uncomplicated prose. And for that audience, I think it’s remarkably successful.”

Paul B. Thompson’s blog, Brightworking.

Darkbeast by Morgan Keyes

Nov12

“But the goat chosen by lot as the scapegoat shall be presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending it into the desert as a scapegoat.” Leviticus 16:10

Darkbeast takes this concept of an animal making atonement or taking away sin and transplants it into a fantasy world somewhat similar to ancient (pagan) Greece. In Keara’s world, however, every child has a darkbeast, a creature that takes the child’s dark deeds and emotions and offers absolution with the formulaic phrase, “I take your (rebellion, pride, anger, etc). Forget it. It is mine.” Even as the scapegoat symbolically took the sins of the nation of Israel into the wilderness, Keara’s darkbeast, the raven Caw takes her bitterness and jealously and gives her in return a magical feeling of “lightness as if I were floating like a tuft of thistledown on a spring breeze.”

Most “normal” children tolerate and even hate their darkbeasts, long to leave them behind and become adults, but Keara says she cannot imagine “never again hearing my darkbeast’s voice, never again listening to his well-worn formula. I could not imagine what my life would be like after I became a proper woman among my people on my twelfth nameday. After I had sacrificed Caw on the cool onyx altar in the center of Bestius’s godhouse.” I couldn’t decide if Keara’s affinity for her darkbeast symbolized hanging on to sin or to childhood or to a treasured source of friendship and forgiveness, but the idea was intriguing and gave me much food for thought.

There’s an explanation for the whole darkbeast cycle of forgiveness and atonement in the final chapter of the book, but that explanation was less satisfying to me, as a Christian, than my own thoughts about the possible meanings and ramifications of the concepts in the book. However, don’t think that Darkbeast is mostly a philosophical tale about sin and sacrifice; actually, it’s mostly just a cracking good story about a girl, Keara, who runs away from home to join a troupe of traveling players and to find herself and her place in the world, a coming of age story set in a fantasy world that bears enough resemblance to our own to be identifiable and yet has enough differences to keep it unpredictable.

In the last third of the book there’s also a drama competition where the actors present their best plays before the ruler of the country and before the gods, reinforcing the similarity to ancient Greece. The Greeks had their Great Dionysia in which playwrights such as Aechylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes competed for prizes and glory. The contest in this book, performed for the twelve gods of Duodecia, is quite similar to that of the ancient Greeks.

Darkbeast tells an excellent story, and one I would like to follow into the next volume of the series.

If you want to know more before or after you read the book:
Here Morgan Keyes writes about the inspiration for the twelve gods of Duodecia.
Here she discusses rites of passage such as Keara’s obligation to sacrifice her darkbeast, Caw.
More at Morgan Keyes’ official Darkbeast website.

Twice Upon a Time by James Riley

Nov10

I have been known to use a bit of sarcasm in dealing with my urchins. (“Wow! You cleaned your room without being asked. Let’s give you a prize!”) Said urchins have been known to blame their propensity for sarcasm on me, their long-suffering mom. (“Where do you think we get the sarcasm from, the postman?”) I have a fairly high tolerance for snark and sarcasm, which may or may not be a good thing.

However, 340 pages of unremitting sarcasm, and not-very-witty sarcasm at that, surpasses my limit. Twice Upon a Time, the sequel to Half Upon a Time, by James Riley is middle school sarcastic humor at its best or worst, depending on how much of it you can enjoy/tolerate. Jack, May, and Prince Philip are on a quest to find out the secret of May’s true identity. Of course, they are impeded in their quest by various uncooperative or plainly evil fairy tale characters. May’s favorite rejoinder when obstructed in her journey is, “Just stand still long enough for me to kick you in the face!” If that threat doesn’t work, May does a lot of yelling in all-caps and words pronounced clearly and distinctly with periods after each one: “SEND. US. BACK. NOW.”

Jack and May communicate almost entirely in sarcastic asides and insults, but they’re supposed to care about each other in an embarrassed middle school way. It reminds me of a phase my urchins went through in which their favorite answer to everything anyone said was “your mom!” or “your mom eats Oreos!” Don’t try to understand; it’s sarcastic, only funny the first 100 times, middle school humor.

May: “Like you can’t pull off a little stupid.”
“He makes stupid choices when I’m not around! He’s going to get himself killed!”
“Way to go, Jack. How am I supposed to rescue you when I’m all locked up?”
Jack: “I can’t even begin to tell you how stupid that was.”
“I bet she’ll randomly show up here and poke her head in these bars to chat ‘Cause that’s so likely to happen.”

And the beat goes on.

As May says, “You all were a lot cuter in the cartoons, you know.”

If you read Half Upon a Time, which I assume is calibrated to the same snark level as its sequel and you weren’t overloaded, then Twice Upon a Time will deliver more of the same. The plot seems to be a vehicle for the snappy dialog as the characters move from one crisis to the next and from one fairy tale land to the next: Hamelin, to Never Land, to Under the Sea to Bluebeard’s ship. And everywhere, in every situation, at the moment of truth, May yells that fearsome threat, “I’M GOING TO KICK YOUR FACE!”

And all resistance is rendered futile.

The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy by Nikki Loftin

Nov8

Wow! This book definitely wins the Darkness and Doom Award over all the other books I’ve read for the Cybils Science Fiction and Fantasy category so far. In fact, I can’t imagine a much darker bit of middle grade fantasy, unless it was one that chose to forego the conventional happy ending. If you’re going to check out Sinister Sweetness, I’m giving you the comfort going in of knowing that the book does have a happy ending. Otherwise, you might drown in all the darkness before you got there.

Lots of books these days, and a few TV shows, are riffs on traditional fairy tales. However, not too many books choose to take the story of Hansel and Gretel as a starting point. The whole “witch cooking children in an oven and eating them” is a sort of gruesome for a children’s book. Sinister Academy, however, rushes in where others fear to tread.

When Lorelei’s old school burns down and a sparkling new charter school appears near her home practically overnight, Lorelei is excited to enroll in Splendid Academy, especially since the principal, Mrs. Trapp, is so very understanding, and the school itself has very few rules and lots and lots of candy and other great food. It’s an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord of kid-friendly treats every day at Splendid Academy, and only Lorelei and her new friend Andrew seem to have any suspicions that all may not be exactly as it seems at the wonderful Splendid Academy.

I read this book during breaks while I was judging a debate tournament, and that setting may have made the story feel even more sinister than it is. Or maybe it’s just that ghastly and monstrous. The teachers at Splendid Academy are the stuff of nightmares. I did think it was odd that Lorelei didn’t figure out what was going on at her new school more readily and that she didn’t run away from home as soon as she did figure it out. No, she just keeps going back to school every day, just like those people in the horror movie who open the door or go around the corner when the sinister music is playing or who enter the haunted house or tell everybody else to leave, “I’ll be just fine alone.” Nobody in the real world would return to Splendid Academy just as no one would ever stick around after the first few notes of that creepy movie music that tells you something really bad is about to happen.

Lorelei also has “it’s my fault my parent died of cancer” syndrome, a problem with which many children in middle grade fiction seem to be afflicted (cp. What Came from the Stars by Gary Schmidt, A Monster Calls by Partrick Ness, etc.) I’m not making light of the false guilt children sometimes feel when a parent dies or when parents divorce, but this unresolved guilt trope does seem to come up in fiction for middle graders over and over again. If you’re wondering, that part ends well, too.

Sinister Sweetness is for children who like grim and macabre, with a side dish of witches practicing cannibalism. It certainly doesn’t glorify or normalize Evil.

Caught by Margaret Peterson Haddix

Nov7

Caught, The Missing, Book 5 by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

I have enjoyed all of the books in this series about time-traveling children who were kidnapped from their proper places in history and given to adoptive parents in the twenty-first century, but Caught may be my favorite of all the books in the series. In this installment, Joshua and his sister Katherine go back to the early twentieth century to prevent the unraveling of Time by the unwitting interference of the super-intelligent Albert Einstein and his wife Mileva and to rectify the kidnapping of Mileva’s and Albert’s first, secret daughter, Lieserl.

The story uses the true story of a daughter that Einstein and his first wife hid because of her illegitimacy and takes that piece of historical information to create a novel that asks all of the old time travel questions and deals with the mind-bending answers in a fresh and thought-provoking way. You could start with this fifth book in the series, but I’d suggest starting at the beginning with Book 1, Found, and continuing on if you like the first one. I do think the books get better as the series progresses.

“If you’d asked me back in the time cave, back at the beginning of all this—when it began for you, I mean—I would have said that I understood time travel perfectly. . . I knew that the past was set in stone, and had to be kept that way, to prevent any paradoxes or cause-and-effect catastrophes. But I thought that the present–my present–was open and flexible and free for me to use however I wished. I thought my contemporaries and I had free will, but everyone in history was locked into . . . well, shall we call it fate?”

I’m writing this review on the day after election day in the U.S., and the above quote sounds quite prescient and analogous to my thought processes and those of many of my friends:

“If you had asked me back six months ago, I would have said that I understood God’s purposes in this election perfectly. I knew that Obama had to be defeated to prevent more abortions and the re-definition of marriage and confiscatory taxation and other evils. I thought that my vote and everyone else’s was free and we had free will, but that God would do just as I thought He should and make sure that The Good prevailed.”

J.B., a “time agent” in the Missing series, then quotes Albert Einstein:

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filed with books in many languages. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”

Or as C.S. Lewis put it more succinctly, using the name “Aslan” for God, “He’s wild, you know. Not like a tame lion.”

God is working His own purposes out, and we see through a glass very dimly. I have moved from reviewing to “meddling”, but these are the thoughts I had as I read about Einstein and his wife and Time and relativity and fate and the foolishness of the most intelligent of human beings. I’m called to “try to help people” the best I can and “have fun (joy) while I still can.” Oh, and always Read Good Books. The rest is mostly beyond my capacity for understanding.

Some post-election scriptures:

“He raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he seats them with princes and has them inherit a throne of honor. For the foundations of the earth are the LORD’s; upon them he has set the world.” I Samuel 2:8

“Some of the wise will stumble, so that they may be refined, purified and made spotless until the time of the end, for it will still come at the appointed time.” Daniel 11:35.

“Praise be to the name of God for ever and ever; wisdom and power are his. He changes times and seasons; he sets up kings and deposes them. He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in darkness, and light dwells with him.” Daniel 2:20-22

“I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone–for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.” I Timothy 2:1-2.

“The LORD your God is with you, he is mighty to save. He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.” Zephaniah 3:17.

Island of Silence (The Unwanteds) by Lisa McMann

Nov7

Island of Silence is Book 2 in The Unwanteds series, and it suffered in my reading from my not having read the first book. I couldn’t really tell if the characters were poorly developed, or if I just missed the development. I tried to give the book the benefit of the doubt, but I would suggest that you start with Book 1 if you want to check this series out.

In Island of Silence, Quill and Artime are neighboring countries that are recovering from a recent war between the two. The magical barrier between the two countries is now gone. The artistic warriors of Artime struggle to forgive the citizens of Quill who sent them to their deaths and to take in refugees from grey, colorless Quill. The people still in Quill struggle to recover from their defeat in the war and the loss of their slaves, the Necessaries, and to understand what to do about the collapse of their safe and orderly society (based on slave labor). Alex Stowe, our protagonist, muddles through the book, trying to figure out his place in all of this post-war rebuilding and rejects the idea that he could be a leader in the new Artime. Then, a crisis gives Alex no choice but to confront his own insecurities and the schemes of his twin brother in Quill, Aaron, who is determined to return to power using any means necessary, even magic.

Here’s Alice at Supratentorial reviewing the first book, The Unwanteds, which, by the way, was a favorite with her nine year old son. So the series definitely has some things going for it. The blurb on the front is “The Hunger Games Meets Harry Potter“(not much Hunger Games, lots of Harry Potter). Creativity and artistic ability are valued in this world (well, eventually). The plot is exciting and well-paced. Book Two is all about the hard work of making peace between historic enemies.

However, just as Alice did with the first book in the series, I had questions after I finished reading Island of Silence, not about what’s going to happen next (the series is obviously unfinished at the end of Book 2), but about what in cat-hair was going on in Book 2.
Why does Mr. Today seem so ineffectual when he’s supposed to be the creator and sustainer of the country of Artime?
Why isn’t anyone keeping an eye on Aaron if he was so evil in the first book?
Why won’t the Wanteds do anything to get their own food if they’re starving? How do the Unwanted get fed? By magic? No one seems to do much in the way of work in this book.
What’s with the lack of water in both Quill and Artime? Why? It rains, doesn’t it? (Maybe this problem was explained in Book 1?)
Why do the Necessaries go back to Quill where they were slaves?
Why is Aaron so bad, and Alex so humble and good? Why do they make such diametrically opposed choices?
Why does Mr. Today choose Alex to be his successor?

Lots more questions, but you get the idea. I’m going to go with neutral as far as a recommendation on this one. If you decide to try it, start at the beginning, and then come back and let me know if I should start all over myself and read it the right way. Maybe it would work better that way.

Above World by Jenn Reese

Nov6

“Above World” is what the Coral Kampii in the City of Shifting Tides call the land world outside the ocean. Thirteen year old Aluna has lived beneath the ocean’s surface all her life, and she’s about to undergo the ceremony in which she will be genetically modified to receive her tail to replace the two legs she now carries. (She’ll be sort of like a mermaid, only not.) All of the creatures in this future dystopia are genetically modified to be able to live in parts of the earth that were historically uninhabitable: the ocean (Kampii and Deepfell), the desert (Horse People and Snake People), the air (Aviars). All of these hybrid creatures depend on LegendaryTek for power to sustain their technical modifications.

However, there are also villains in Above World. Some of the hybrid people may be enemies, more concerned with their own survival than with that of anyone else. Upgraders and other animal-like creatures have modified themselves so much that they are more machine than human. Humans, if any are left, are considered barbarians. It’s a dangerous world. But Alana decids that she must go to Above World to save her people the Coral Kampii who are dying for some unknown reason.

Martial arts aficionados would especially enjoy this story since there’s lots of “kung fu fighting” (is everybody else too young to remember that song?). Alana is a tough, fighting, feminist heroine, and her friend Hoku makes a good contrast with his techie/geek personality.
The blurb asks, “Will Aluna’s warrior spirit and Hoku’s intelligence be enough not only to keep themselves safe but also to find a way to save their city and possibly the world?”

I’m going to start keeping count. In the middle grade fantasies I’m reading, how many of them portray the girl (protagonist) as the tough, fighting leader and rescuer and the boy (if there is one) as the gentle or confused or phlegmatic sidekick in need of rescuing? I think it’s a trend, but maybe not.

Female leader/rescuer (12): Above World by Jenn Reese, The Book of Wonders by , Snow in Summer by Jane Yolen, Peaceweaver by Rebecca Barnhouse, Winterling by Sarah Prineas, Sword Mountain by Nancy Yi Fan, The Cabinet of Earths by Anne Nesbet, Renegade Magic by Stephanie Burgis, Mr. and Mrs. Bunny: Detectives Extarordinaire by Polly Horvath, Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz, Ordinary Magic by Caitlin Rubino-Bradway, Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy by Nikki Loftin.

Male leader/rescuer (9): Rock of Ivanore by Laurisa White Reyes, Goblin Secrets by William Alexander, The False Prince by Jennifer Nielsen, Neversink by Barry Wolverton, Cold Cereal by Adam Rex, The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate, The Unwanteds: Island of Silence by Lisa McMann, Twice Upon a Time by James Riley.

Equally strong male and female protagonists (4): Time Snatchers by Richard Ungar, Storybound by Marissa Burt, Circus Galacticus by Deva Fagan, The Brightworking by Paul B. Thompson.

The girls are winning so far.

Horten’s Miraculous Mechanisms: Magic, Mystery and a Very Strange Adventure by Lissa Evans

Nov5

Stuart Horten moves to a new town and finds out that his great-uncle was a magician, a performing magician who invented and sold magical illusions. But Teeny Tiny Tony Horten was also a real magician who disappeared one day and left a trail of clues for finding his magical workshop to the boy who was “the right sort of boy to have it.”

Everybody loves a treasure hunt with sequential clues to find a secret treasure. And lots of kids go through a magic phase in which they’re interested in learning to do magic tricks, card tricks, and slight of hand. (Some kids never grow out of that “phase” and they become grown-up magicians, I guess.) This book by British author Lissa Evans plays into both of those fascinations.

The book includes more than just magical illusions–there’s time travel magic and wishing-upon-a-threepence magic, too. Stuart meets and gets some help from his next-door neighbors, identical triplets named April, May, and June. There’s also a factory for the manufacture of magic tricks and a book of photographs that is part of the treasure hunt. And the book has a sequel: Horten’s Incredible Illusions: Magic, Mystery and Another Very Strange Adventure..I’m looking forward to adventuring along with Mr. Horten as he explores his inheritance from Great-Uncle Tony.

What Came from the Stars by Gary D. Schmidt

Nov3

I just finished What Came from the Stars, and I loved it. I was somewhat annoyed by all the “foreign” words at first (“The quality of a Sci-Fi/Fantasy story is inversely proportional to the number of new words made up by the author.”), but then I started having fun trying to figure out exactly what they meant. Then, I got to the end and saw that there is a glossary. Duh!

Anyway, I looked for some other reviews on this one (Melissa’s review, Sondra’s review) because I remembered a couple of people saying that the book didn’t live up to their expectations. That in turn lowered my expectations, and I think that’s one reason I liked it so much. (I’m susceptible and contrary like that. I also thought Okay for Now by Mr. Schmidt should have won at least a Newbery Honor last year, another expectation which might be coloring my opinion.) I really liked the “ordinariness” of the hero, Tommy, and the theme of healing after tragedy and bravery in sacrifice, and the battle between the Valorim and the O’Mondrim. The evil real estate developer was a bit of a stereotypical plot device/character, but everything else worked for me.

The book alternates between an epic story of battle between good and evil on a planet far, far away and the poignant earthly story of Tommy and his sister Patty and their artist father who are trying to recover from their grief over the untimely death of Tommy’s mother. The language for the alternating parts of the story is very different, the two narratives are set apart from each other by different print, italic for the story of the Valorim and regular font for the story of how Tommy comes to encounter and help the Valorim in their fight against the darkness.

Chapter 1, The Last Days of the Valorim: “So the Valorim came to know that their last days were upon them. The Reced was doomed, and the Ethelim they had loved well and guarded long would fall under the sharp trunco of the faceless O’Mondim and the traitors who led them.”

Chapter 2, Tommy Pepper’s Birthday: “It was Tommy Pepper’s twelfth birthday, and for it he had unwrapped the dumbest birthday present in the history of the entire universe: an Ace Robotroid Adventure lunch box.”

The alternating chapters and the intersection of our world with that of a distant planet made my imagination happy. I’m ready to go visit the weoruld of the Ethelim, if I can just figure out how to travel at the speed of Thought. That’s the test of good world-building for me—if I want to go and see it for myself. (Or maybe in the cases of some dystopian worlds, if I really, really don’t want to see such a world ever.)

I think Narnia fans and Madeleine L’Engle fans (like me) would really like What Came from the Stars.