Saturday Review of Books: November 17, 2012

Nov16

“All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality — the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.” ~Arthur Christopher Benson

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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.

The Seven Tales of Trinket by Shelley Moore Thomas

Nov16

I don’t like short stories, and I don’t much like it when authors disguise a book of stories as a novel by creating some over-arching narrative that sorta, kinda ties the stories together. Thank goodness, The Seven Tales of Trinket is NOT that kind of book.

Yes, there are seven tales here: folk tales about faeries and banshees and selkies and a gypsy fortune-teller and a pooka. And the journey of Trinket and her friend, the pig-boy Thomas, to find adventure and to find Trinket’s father is the Tale that ties all of the seven tales together. But the book is a meditation and a story about telling stories, about the art of the Irish seanechai or storyteller. And the author, Ms. Thomas, is storyteller herself. So it all works together; it just fits.

As Trinket looks for her father, James the Bard, who left on a story-telling journey of his own long ago and never returned to Trinket and her mother, she grows and becomes the storyteller she wants to be. She’s not a copy of her father or of her beautiful mother, although she carries a little of each of them in herself. She’s Trinket, the Story Lass, her own person and a teller of tales in her own right.

My favorite story of the tales Trinket lives and collects is the story of the The Faerie Queen and the Gold Coin. I delighted in this story of Orla, a girl who’s such an accomplished dancer that the Faerie Queen takes notice and challenges her to a dancing contest. Of course, as Trinket says, “humans and magical beings often see things differently.” The Faerie Queen changes the rules of the contest at the last minute, and Orla must dance the dance of her life to win the contest.

These are lovely stories, drawn from Celtic sources but adapted to fit with and enrich Trinket’s story. If all story collections were this well harmonized and tied together, I’d read more stories. Because it’s a story-telling kind of book, this one would be a great classroom or homeschool read aloud.

A Couple of Ghost Stories

Nov15

Ghosts are always good for a fall evening of reading. My favorite ghost stories: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte, Hamlet by Shakespeare, The Saracen Lamp by Ruth M. Arthur (an oldie but goodie for children/YA), The Turn of the Screw by Henry James, The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens,

As you can see, old-fashioned ghost stories are my favorites, so these Cybils nominees were just O.K. for me. If you’re a fan of the ghost story genre, you may really enjoy them, though.

The Whispering House by Rebecca Wade.
This ghost story reminded me at first of an Agatha Christie novel or an Alfred Hitchcock TV episode. The tone was very matter of fact and not supernatural at all. I kept thinking throughout the first half of the book that everything would turn out to have a natural, if somewhat sinister, explanation: the dusty, spooky attic, the creepy doll, the deteriorating house, the stories of mysterious death a hundred years in the past. But then a ghostly visitor, a little Victorian girl named Maisie, who may or may not have been murdered by her ugly spinster aunt, starts making appearances, breaking things, leaving messages in strange places, and generally creating poltergeist-like havoc. And our twenty-first century protagonist, Hannah Price, travels or dreams herself into Maisie’s time, chasing the elusive ghostly girl in the white dress with the long dark streaming hair (see cover art, which is very good and evocative, by the way). And after that, things get really ghostly and somewhat ghastly, and there is obviously not going to be any natural explanation for the events in the story.

Still, the sensible, pragmatic actions of the children in the story make the supernatural elements that much more eerie. Hannah and her friend Sam go to visit their friend Miss Murdoch, a Wiccan witch, to get her take on the strange events in the borrowed house that Hannah’s family has rented. Hannah asks her friend the bishop what he thinks about it all. (The bishop and the Wiccan have a friendly but competitive discussion about the differences between magic and miracle, a discussion that I would have liked to read more of.) Hannah takes the doll, which has human hair, to be tested by her friend at the police lab. (Hannah has a lot of useful adult friends.) The kids do normal things to solve this abnormal mystery. I liked that aspect of the story.

A Greyhound of a Girl by Roddy Doyle
A Greyhound of a Girl is very Irish, and I liked that. But it didn’t really feel like a children’s book, exactly. The story is about four generations of women, and it’s partly told from the youngest girl’s point of view. But it’s also about the girl’s grandmother and great-grandmother (who’s a ghost), and I guess it just left some questions unanswered for me. Why did the great-grandmother feel as if she had to stick around as a ghost? She says it’s to make sure her daughter was O.K. but that took about 60 years of ghost-hood?

The themes are death and dying and living life to its fullest, and the characters have rich and thoughtful conversations about those issues. I think adults would enjoy this book more than children would, but I could be underestimating children and over-estimating adults.

A few ghost quotes:
“You said I killed you – haunt me, then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe. I know that ghosts have wandered on earth. Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!” Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte.

“In one aspect, yes, I believe in ghosts, but we create them. We haunt ourselves.” ~Laurie Halse Anderson, Wintergirls

“[M]ost people have never seen a ghost, and never want or expect to, but almost everyone will admit that sometimes they have a sneaking feeling that they just possibly could meet a ghost if they weren’t careful – if they were to turn a corner too suddenly, perhaps, or open their eyes too soon when they wake up at night, or go into a dark room without hesitating first.”
~Shirley Jackson, Come Along With Me

What’s your favorite ghost story?

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.

Saturday Review of Books: November 10, 2012

Nov9

“All the glory of the world would be buried in oblivion, unless God had provided mortals with the remedy of books.” ~Richard De Bury, in Philobiblion

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.

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.