Rock of Ivanore by Laurisa White Reyes

Oct22

Book One of The Celestine Chronicles.

Ms. Reyes says that this book, or series of books, started out as a bedtime story for her son, Marcum. It’s high fantasy, owing certainly something to Tolkien and to Star Wars, as most of this kind of fantasy does. Marcus and five other boys from his village, Quendel, set out on a Great Quest to find the Rock of Ivanore. Marcus takes with him a magical key and a walking stick named Xerxes. If the boys succeed, they will be heroes; if they fail they will return to disrespect and menial jobs in the village for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately for the boys, they have no idea what the Rock of Ivanore is or where to find it.

Marcus is an orphan, of course, and he has daddy issues. The other boys, including Kelvin, also an orphan and sort of a secondary protagonist, are described and take part in the action, but I never could pin down what made any of them tick. Why is Kelvin so prickly and distrustful of strangers? Why does Marcus steal something that belongs to Kelvin and only return it when forced to do so? Why does anyone follow Jerrid, the mayor’s son? The other three boys are mostly inconsequential afterthoughts; they sometimes play a part or have a bit of dialog, but they’re not very memorable.

More interesting as characters were Jayson, the half-breed Agoran, part cat and part human, and Xerxes, the talking walking stick that only Marcus can hear. I wanted to know more about them and understand them both better. King Frederic of Dokur is a wimp and a whiner, but his son Arik makes an adequate villain.

At 350 pages of fairly large print, this book might satisfy fantasy adventure fans who are looking for something a little easier and/or shorter to read than Tolkien or Rowling. But it left me a bit cold. I couldn’t get too interested in the characters, their stories, or their fates until about three-quarters of the way through the book. I can, however, see the potential for improvement as this series continues.

Ms.Reyes’ blog: 1000wrongs.blogspot.com

Me, Myself and Bob by Phil Vischer

Oct21

“If God gives you a dream, and the dream comes to life and God shows up in it, and then the dream dies, it may be that God wants to see what is more important to you –the dream or him. And once he’s seen that, you may get your dream back. Or you may not, and you may live the rest of your life without it. But that will be O.K., because you’ll have God.” ~Richard Porter in Me, Myself and Bob by Phil Vischer.

Phil Vischer had a dream, to build the biggest and the best Christian media company ever, to be the next (Christian) Walt Disney. And God blessed that dream and grew Big Idea Productions into a corporation worth millions of dollars, producing videos that encouraged and entertained millions of kids and adults. Then, God took it away.

This story was powerful. I understand what it is to have a dream, a Godly dream, and have it taken away or deferred. I understand what it is to ask God, “Why? Why have You not given me this good thing? This thing that is the desire of my heart and that will honor and glorify You?” It’s really hard. I don’t know real physical suffering, and maybe I would be a wimp when it came to actual suffering. But I know emotional and spiritual suffering and despair because I’ve been there. Sometimes I’m still there. And all know is that I hang on to two verses in the Bible. These are my life verses:

Job 13:15. God might kill me, but I have no other hope. I am going to argue my case with him. (New Living Translation)

John 6:67-68. So Jesus asked the twelve disciples, “You don’t want to leave, too, do you?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

I stand with Peter and Job and Phil Vischer.

“The Christian life wasn’t about running like a maniac; it was about walking with God. It wasn’t about impact; it was about obedience. It wasn’t about making stuff up; it was about listening. . . . God doesn’t love me because of what I can do for Him. He just loves me—even when I’ve done nothing at all.”

If you know who Phil Vischer is and you’re a fan, I highly recommend this memoir. If you’re not familiar with the creator of Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber and Big Idea Productions, I still think you might find Mr. Vischer to be an inspirational guy, in an upside-down kind of way. He tells us in Me, Myself and Bob what God showed him when the Dream, the God-given dream, died in a horribly messy and hurtful way. If you don’t have the book, you can read the short version of What Happened to Big Idea here at Phil Vischer’s blog.

Saturday Review of Books: October 20, 2012

Oct19

“When you choose to read instead of clean the kitchen you are refusing to accept that your worth as a person is measured by the visible results that you produce in the world.” ~Susan Wise Bauer

SatReviewbutton

Welcome to the Saturday Review of Books at Semicolon. Here’s how it usually works. Find a book review on your blog posted sometime during the previous week. The review doesn’t have to be a formal sort of thing. You can link to your thoughts on a particular book, a few ideas inspired by reading the book, your evaluation, quotations, whatever.

Then on Friday night/Saturday, you post a link here at Semicolon in Mr. Linky to the specific post where you’ve written your book review. Don’t link to your main blog page because this kind of link makes it hard to find the book review, especially when people drop in later after you’ve added new content to your blog. In parentheses after your name, add the title of the book you’re reviewing. This addition will help people to find the reviews they’re most interested in reading.

After linking to your own reviews, you can spend as long as you want reading the reviews of other bloggers for the week and adding to your wishlist of books to read. That’s how my own TBR list has become completely unmanageable and the reason I can’t join any reading challenges. I have my own personal challenge that never ends.

Time Snatchers by Richard Ungar

Oct19

Caleb is a time snatcher, an orphan trained by the man he calls “Uncle”, to travel through time and steal valuable artifacts that people in the year 2060 will pay big bucks to own. His time-traveling and thieving partner is Abbie, and the two of them have been living with Uncle and working for his company, Timeless Treasures, for as long as they can remember. The two teens enjoy their time travel, cat burglar adventures, but Uncle is becoming more and more callous and brutal. And Caleb is confused by his longing for a real family and by his feelings for Abbie. Are they partners or does Abbie care for Caleb in a different, more romantic way? Or is Abbie falling for Caleb’s cheating arch-enemy, Frank?

The author blurb says that Mr. Ungar “was inspired to write this novel by an image in Chris Van Allsburg’s picture book The Mysteries of Harris Burdick.” Good inspiration. Time Snatchers is a good novel.

What I liked: the idea of combining con games and cat burglary with time travel, the characterization of Caleb in particular, the cranky computer cyborg, Phoebe, who runs the elevator and has a running feud with Caleb, some of the snatches that Abbie and Caleb pull off.

What I disliked: Uncle is a particularly nasty bad guy who engages in rather gruesome child abuse to keep his “time snatchers” in line. To be specific, he uses a sword to cut off body parts of those who disobey him, and at one point he has his captive snapping turtles gnaw on Caleb’s arm. Yuck. The torture episodes gave me a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Also, the romantic interludes (very tame and junior high-ish) seemed a little bit abrupt, not quite enough set-up or insight into what Abbie is thinking or feeling.

I’ve been watching a lot of the TV show White Collar, and I was reminded of that program while I was reading Time Snatchers. Caleb is not quite as classy as Neil Caffrey; he’s a lot younger, for one thing. However, just as Neil wants to know who his parents were and wants to be a part of a family, Caleb longs for a normal life with a real family. And both Caleb and Neil are pretty good at fast-thinking and theft. Unfortunately for both of them, thievery is not a very sustainable or morally justifiable lifestyle. Neil Caffrey and Caleb are both in the process of learning that crime doesn’t pay.

Time Snatchers ends with major unresolved questions, so I’m assuming we’re headed for a sequel or two. If you don’t mind the child abuse parts, it’s a good story.

Nanny Piggins and the Wicked Plan by R.A. Spratt

Oct18

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.)

Beswitched by Kate Saunders

Oct17

In The Freedom Maze, Sophie found out that life back in the antebellum South wasn’t all Scarlett O’Hara and Southern plantation mansions. In Beswitched, Flora Fox finds out that a girls’ boarding school in 1935 isn’t exactly filled with modern conveniences either.

Time travel is like that: the time traveler who goes back in time gets to find out how the other half lived. Flora finds out that the clothes and manners of the 1930’s were rather uncomfortable, but she and her roommates become great friends with only a few missteps and cultural misunderstandings. The story paints a lovely picture of life in a girls’ boarding school in 1935, just before the second World War, and I almost wanted to go back in time myself to visit, if I could be sure to get back to my time before the war started.

I liked Beswitched, but a couple of things about the story made me uncomfortable. I didn’t much like all the spell-casting and witchy magic, even though the magic itself turned out to be benign. Maybe that was the problem: witchcraft, real witchcraft, isn’t a bit of good-natured fun. It’s a religion, and it’s evil. It’s the same problem that many Christians had (and still have) with the Harry Potter series, and I can get past it by telling myself that the magic in the Beswitched is just a mechanism to enable the time travel element of the story. (Harry Potter is an alternate world, and so the “rules” about magic and witches are different. Those books don’t raise my “dabbling in witchcraft” sensors at all.) Still, schoolgirls casting spells is kind of, well, disturbing.

The other part of the book that bothered me is that I didn’t really like the two main characters very much. Both Flora and her friend from the 1930’s, Pete, are, well, to put it bluntly, spoiled brats. The point of the book is supposed to be that the experience of magical time travel and each of them encountering a girl from another time period changes them both, but I never did warm up to either of the two girls. I guess I have twin prejudices against spoiled children and spell-casting witches.

On the Day I Died by Candace Fleming

Oct16

I remember Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone. Paranormal fiction, phantoms and ghouls, stories of the weird, the supernatural, and the spectral.

What do kids watch nowadays when they want a good, old-fashioned ghostly supernatural story or creepy mystery (not romantic vampires or stupid zombies)? For that matter, what do they read? Neil Gaiman. Mary Downing Hahn. Goosebumps. Eventually they could graduate to Stephen King or X-Files, I guess.

But what if the reader is looking for ghost stories, not novels? The kind of stories that were presented by Mr. Hitchcock or introduced by Rod Serling on the Twilight Zone? The kind you tell on a camp out on a dark night?

Subtitled “Stories from the Grave”, Ms. Fleming’s book fits that niche. The book includes nine stories, set in and around Chicago, all about teenagers who died. These stories eschew the violence and gore that so often substitutes for real suspense and spookiness these days, and instead they go straight for that horrified, eerie response feeling. You know, when you ask yourself, “Could that really happen? Naaaaa, maybe, well?”

Mike is led to a graveyard by a ghostly hitchhiker, surrounded by the ghost of teens who need to tell their stories, and compelled to listen to those stories. For instance, there’s Scott (1995-2012) who didn’t believe in the supernatural until he decided to make a visit to the abandoned grounds of Chicago State Asylum for the Insane. Johnnie (1920-1936) was a juvenile delinquent with a predilection for revenge until one of his victims took her revenge on him. There’s also a “monkey’s paw” story (Lily 1982-1999), and another (Edgar 1853-1870) that’s a take off from Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, The Yellow Wallpaper.

I’d get this one, especially if you live in or are familiar with the Chicago area, just in time for Halloween. I can picture a Halloween party with older middle schoolers or young high schoolers dressed up as the dead people in the stories and prepared to tell their own “stories from the grave.”

The book could also be a springboard for research into your own local folklore about ghost sightings and death stories. Ms. Fleming began her stories with “memory and myth”, “local legend and folklore”, and “nearby places, real-life people, actual events.” She writes in the author’s notes at the end of the book, “The best ghost stories, I learned, should always include a kernel of truth.”

Maybe some of the stories at the website Ghosts of America could be starter seeds for your own book of ghostly tales. These stories are from my own hometown of San Angelo, Texas.

The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman

Oct15

When thirteen year old Sophie, bored with her life in the summer of 1960 in rural Louisiana, wishes for a magical adventure, a nameless, capricious, ghostly creature sends her 100 years into the past to the year 1860 in Louisiana, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. Sophie gets a lot more adventure than she bargained for, and she soon realizes that going back into the past isn’t all fun and games.

The Freedom Maze is kind of a Gone With the Wind tale, set on an antebellum Louisiana plantation and told from the point of view of the black slaves instead of the white masters (or mistresses). In fact, it might be a good balance or antidote to Gone With the Wind and other romanticized versions of life in the Old South. It certainly wasn’t all belles and balls and big dresses, especially not for the slaves who made the economy and culture of the region workable by their bondage and labor. I thought it was fascinating, educational, well-written, and terribly sad, with a touch of hope at the end. Older middle grade readers (age 13 and up) who are interested in learning the truth about what slavery was really like will find the story illuminating.

Warning: This book contains “hoodoo” and herb magic and superstition and ghostly magical creatures. The way these things were portrayed in the book wasn’t a problem for me as a conservative, evangelical Christian, but if you don’t want any elements like these in your reading or your child’s, then The Freedom Maze is not for you. Even more problematical for some readers might be the recurring stories of attempted rape and miscegenation as slave owners “meddle with” their female slaves producing light-skinned progeny who remain enslaved and considered “black.” That this sort of thing happened frequently is undeniable, and the descriptions are not graphic. However, my eleven year old would be clueless and confused as to what was going on in this story. My thirteen year old just might learn something about the tragedies of life and of our history.

The Prairie Thief by Melissa Wiley

Oct14

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.

The Prince Who Fell from the Sky by John Claude Bemis

Oct13

“JRR Tolkien said that story ideas arise from ‘the leaf-mould of the mind.’ This story grew out of the rich compost of Alan Weisman’s speculative science book The World Without Us; Native American creation myths; one of the first postapocalyptic novels (and possibly the only hopeful one), Earth Abides by George R. Stewart; and the animal-fantasy classics The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling and Watership Down by Richard Adams.” Acknowledgements, The Prince Who Fell from the Sky by John Claude Bemis.

This story surprised me. I was expecting a medieval fantasy, or maybe a science fiction/medieval fantasy with space men going back in time. I guess I should have gotten a clue from the Big Bear on the the cover along with the spaceman-looking boy. This book is talking animals, but not cute talking animals, more like Watership Down, and it takes place in a postapocalyptic Earth jungle or forest where the wolves have taken over as tyrants and absolute rulers.

The bear is Casseomae, and when an airplane or space shuttle or some kind of flying vehicle falls from the sky near Casseomae’s meadow, the great she-bear rescues a a Skinless One, a child, and begins to take care of him as she would her own bear-cub. Along with a rat named Dumpster, Casseomae goes on a quest to find a place where the child-cub will be safe from wolves and other predators, called “voras.”

The bears and other voras speak a languge called Vorago, and there is some new word insertion, but it’s not excessive. (I agree with whoever it was that said that “the quality of a Sci-Fi/Fantasy story is inversely proportional to the number of new words made up by the author.”) The journey is fascinating as Casseomae follows her own instincts to protect her man-cub, and yet realizes that she is not really following the ways of her tribe when she preserves the life of a creature whose ancestors destroyed the entire forest many generations back. I definitely got the Jungle Book vibe from the plot, even thought it’s a very different stye, tone, and narrative from Kipling’s classic.

This book must have been difficult to write because we never see the events or the setting from the point of view of the only human in the story, the boy. Instead, we hear the words and the thoughts of Casseomae and Dumpster and later on, a dog named Pang. It was fun trying to figure out what some of the “relics” and other things that the animals described really were in human terms.

If you’re looking for an animal story combined with post apocalyptic fiction combined with sci-fi, The Prince Who Fell from the Sky is definitely the book for you. If, like me, you just enjoy a surprisingly good story, then this one might also be a good fit for you.