Oh. my. goodness.

Nanny Piggins is the best nanny ever. How would you like to have a nanny who bakes ginormous chocolate cakes and insists upon sharing them with you, watches soap operas and reads trashy romance novels, encourages children to roll in the mud, and generally breaks all the responsible adult nanny rules and allows her charges to do the same. Well, if you’re a parent, Nanny Piggins might not be your first choice to care for your children. But if you’re a kid, Nanny Piggins is going to be the unrivaled Star Super Nanny of all time.

Just compare her with another fictional nanny.

Nanny Piggins versus Mary Poppins
Mary Poppins: “The newcomer had shiny black hair — ‘Rather like a wooden Dutch doll,’ whispered Jane. And she was thin, with large feet and hands, and small, rather peering blue-eyes.”
Nanny Piggins: “The world’s most glamorous flying pig.”

Mary Poppins: “Michael suddenly discovered that you could not look at Mary Poppins and disobey her.”
Nanny Piggins: “Nanny Piggins had no interest in obedience.” “She barely knew what the word obedience meant. And when she found out, she thought it was utterly unimportant. If she ever caught Derrick, Samantha, and Michael doing exactly what she said, she would tell them off for not using their imaginations.”

Mary Poppins: “I shouldn’t wonder if you didn’t wonder much too much!”
Nanny Piggins: “Telling Nanny Piggins she could not do something was always the best way to make sure that was exactly what she did.”

Mary Poppins: “There was something strange and extraordinary about her — something that was frightening and at the same time most exciting.”
Nanny Piggins: “Who could not fall in love with a nanny whose only job qualifications were her astonishing ability to be fired out of a cannon and her tremendous talent for making chocolate cake, sometimes both at the same time?”

So, Mary Poppins is magical and and extraordinary all that kind of thing, and she gives out a “spoonful of sugar” along with medicine (in the movie), but Nanny Piggins gives out huge slices of cake and chocolate bars and lots of other sticky, gooey stuff every day. Movie Mary Poppins teaches her charges to tidy up the nursery while she sings a magical clean-up song. Nanny Piggins orders five tons of mud to be deposited in the garden for her and the children to play in.

No contest. Nanny Piggins wins, hands down. Actually, she does enter the Westminster Nanny Show in chapter eleven, and I will let you guess who wins that contest. Or you could read Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan. (That’s a sneaky, N.P. way of getting you to read the book without telling you to read it. Because I figure you might be about as fond of obedience and being told what to do as Nanny Piggins.)

Brownie: “brounie or urisk (Lowland Scots) or brùnaidh, ùruisg, or gruagach (Scottish Gaelic) is a legendary creature popular in folklore around Scotland and England. . . Brownies are said to inhabit houses and aid in tasks around the house. However, they do not like to be seen and will only work at night, traditionally in exchange for small gifts or food. Among food, they especially enjoy porridge and honey. They usually abandon the house if their gifts are called payments, or if the owners of the house misuse them. Brownies make their homes in an unused part of the house.” Wikipedia, Brownie (folklore).

What if a brownie, or some other such legendary creatures, were transplanted to the New World? To the prairie? Would these native Scots creatures thrive in the lonesome prairie grasses and winds, or would they be homesick for their native land? Would they, like the European (human) people who came to America, take up new ways while keeping some of the old customs, too?

Melissa Wiley has written a delightful little tale for little girls who love fairies and leprechauns and brownies and all the inhabitants of faery land. My own eleven year old is currently poring over a book that she ordered just last week, Fairyopolis, A FLower Fairies Journal. She saw the book at the library, in the reference section, and just had to have it for her own. If I could get her started, my reluctant reader might just devour The Prairie Thief, too.

I also like the fact that this story for young readers doesn’t shy away from those wonderful, challenging vocabulary words that my young readers at any rate relished and gloried in. Ms. Wiley uses words like “obfuscating” and “predilection” and “amenities” and “laconically” just as handily and appropriately as she does the shorter, also vivid words like “pate” and “mite” and “frock”, all of which might enrich a child’s vocabulary as well as delight her mind.

And why shouldn’t a few new words as well as a brownie or a sprite take up residence in an unused part of a child’s imagination (or even mine)? It was G.K. Chesterton who said, ““Stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.”

Eccentric privilege, indeed.

More about brownies.
Jen Robinson’s review of The Prairie Thief.
And another review at Hope Is the Word.

Rownie, whose name is short for Little Rowan, lives in the hut of Graba, a witch with gearwork chicken legs and an appetite for power. (I was reminded of Baba Yaga, the witch character from Slavic folklore that I read about in Highlights Magazine when I was a child.) Rownie’s mother drowned in the River. His father is never mentioned, and his older brother, Rowan the Taller, is missing, disappeared. Rownie, following in the footsteps of his older brother, is fascinated with acting and with masks even though plays are forbidden in the city of Zombay. When he escapes from Graba, he may be in even more trouble as he joins a troupe of traveling goblin actors who are trying to keep the River from flooding Zombay.

I tried to like this one. I did like some things about it, the language, the metaphors, and the descriptions in particular. Some examples:

“He was afraid of Graba, and he was angry for being afraid and upset with himself for having made Graba upset with him. He pushed all of those feelings into a small and heavy lump of clay inside his chest, and then he tried to ignore the lump.”

“Graba herself never bothered to conceal her moods and wishes–her face was as easily readable as words spelled out in burning oil in the middle of the street.”

“Rownie was also impressed, but he still wasn’t convinced. ‘Actors are liars,’ he said. ‘You pretend. It’s kind of your job.’
‘No,’ said Semele. ‘We are always using masks and a lack of facts to find the truth and nudge it into becoming more true.'”

“Those who gathered here sold more fragile things, like bolts of fabric and delicate gearwork—things that needed to be kept out of the weather. One barge displayed strange animals in gold cages. Soap makers invited passersby to smell their wares. A tall man with pale, deep-set eyes sold trinkets carved out of bone. Another barge-stall showed off small and cunning devicesthat did useless things beautifully.”

However, as much as I liked the word pictures, I just couldn’t become immersed in the story itself. In this book and in Winterling, the book I reviewed yesterday, everything was just too otherworldly and creepy and non-human. Even in Narnia, the talking animals, and in Middle Earth, the hobbits and elves, are somewhat anthropomorphic. I can identify with Frodo or Trumpkin the Dwarf, but the characters in these two books felt almost completely foreign and peculiar and incomprehensible.

Once again, you may find Goblin Secrets to be just the book to curl up with on Halloween night.

Some readers might really like this story of a girl named Fer who travels The Way to a magical land, but I’m not sure who those readers would be. It’s a Narnia-like story in that Fer reaches a land which is being ruled by an evil “Mor”, and Fer must use “good magic” to fight against the Mor and free the land from her evil enchantments. However, the atmosphere and feeling is not at all like C.S. Lewis’s tales, but much more pagan and witch-y and spellbound.

Maybe Winterling is a vegetarian, herb-woman fairy tale. Fer is a vegetarian, and several times during the story she emphasizes the fact that she doesn’t eat meat and won’t kill animals. Fer’s grandmother is an herb-woman who teaches Fer to be a healer using various magical spells and herbs. This earth magic later comes in quite handy as Fer confronts the evil Mor and heals the creatures who have been wounded by her magic.

It just took me a long time to get into the story or to identify with any of the characters. About halfway through I began to care about what happened to Fer and her companions, but I still found the book made me feel uneasy and fish-out-of-water. Again, Winterling might be just the book for some fantasy fans, just not really me.

Other voices:
Jen Robinson (disagrees with me): “I think that people who enjoy traditional fantasy (like the C.S. Lewis books) will welcome this addition to the canon. Fans of Anne Ursu’s Breadcrumbs will also want to give this one a look. Recommended for anyone looking to visit a new world (and one with the promise of additional books), ages ten and up.”
(I liked Breadcrumbs, and I love Narnia. But this book just didn’t click with me.)

Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia: “Prineas’ world-building is also top-notch, and her characterization of Fer, her fearful grandmother and the denizens of the other world are outstanding. I’ll look forward to more of Fer, Rook, and further adventures in other lands the next in this series.”

It will be difficult to talk about The False Prince, first book in the Ascendance Trilogy, without spoilers, and this one is a book you probably won’t want spoiled. So if you haven’t read it, I recommend it. You can come back and read my review, if you want, after you read the book. Then we can discuss in the comments.

Sage is an orphan boy, and the book begins in the midst of an episode of roast-theft. I was hooked from the beginning when Sage thinks, “It happens to be very difficult to hold a chunk of raw meat while running. More slippery than I’d anticipated. . . I vowed to remember to get the meat wrapped next time. Then steal it.”

Our resourceful and inventive orphan boy soon becomes the purchased servant of a man named Conner, who turns out to be both a cold-blooded murderer and perhaps a patriot. Conner wants to use one of the four orphan boys he has acquired from various orphanages to save the kingdom of Carthya from civil war or takeover by a hostile neighboring kingdom. But after he chooses one boy to be his false prince, what will happen to the others? In light of Conner’s ruthless character, it can’t be good.

I thought Sage was a wonderfully well-developed, feisty, and surprising character. I guessed that he would turn out to be the real prince, but I couldn’t ever figure out how it would be possible since he had such vivid memories of his real parents. There were a couple of relatively minor plot points that I couldn’t figure out:

Why was Mott, a good guy, working for Conner, a real baddie? Why didn’t Mott quit after Conner murdered a defenseless boy?

Why did the King think it would be safer for Sage to hide in an orphanage than to be protected in the castle? And how did the King justify lying to his wife and telling her that Jaren was dead?

Why didn’t Conner have someone ready immediately to take the throne before the death of King Eckbert, Queen Erin, and Prince Darius? Why wait until afterwards to train a boy to impersonate Jarin?

Anyway, I really liked The False Prince in spite of my questions, and I would like to read the next book in the series when it comes out. By the way, the ending is not too “false” or unresolved. I could tell that there was more to the story, but I wasn’t left dangling in the wind.

Calliope Meadow Anderson (Callie) wishes her life could be more like a fairy tale, where everyone lives happily ever after. But in reality her parents are separated, her best friend Ellen is acting a little weird, and she has to get glasses which will probably make her even more geeky-looking than her abundant freckles, big teeth and dead-leaf colored hair already make her look.

Callie is a typical middle school girl, sure that she doesn’t fit in and not sure exactly how to change that fact. The big black loaner glasses that her strange optometrist gives her don’t exactly help her confidence on the first day of school. However, the glasses do something else: they enable Callie to see other people’s thoughts. What could you learn from a pair of mind-reading glasses?

Here are some of the lessons Callie learned from her Super Freaky Glasses (aka chapter titles):

Rule 1: Don’t get upset if someone thinks your glasses are ugly. They are ugly.

Rule 2: Make sure your crush actually Knows Who You Are before you spy on his thoughts.

Rule 3: Most people tell little white lies. Don’t get offended. You do the same thing.

Rule 9: It’s easier to dislike someone when you don’t have to read their thoughts.

And so it goes. Seeing Cinderella is a story about mind-reading glasses, but it’s just as much a story about navigating middle school and learning to empathize with all different kinds of people. Callie learns that she isn’t the only one who feels insecure a lot of the time, and she begins to make new friends with people she would never have thought of befriending, pre-glasses.

I would recommend this story for girls who are themselves “navigating middle school” and learning to make new friends and sometimes let go of the old ones. There are definitely “lessons” in the subtext, but it’s a gentle teaching couched in a gentle, funny, gem of a story.