A Dragon Used to Live Here by Annette LeBlanc Cate

Oct17

Noble children Thomas and Emily have always known their mother to be sensible, the lady of the castle—if anything, a bit boring. But then they discover Meg, a cranky scribe who lives in the castle basement, leading a quirky group of artists in producing party invitations and other missives for the nobles above. Meg claims that she was a friend of their mother’s back when the two were kids—even before the dragon lived in the castle. Wait—a dragon? Not sure they can believe Meg’s tales, the kids return again and again to hear the evolving, fantastical story of their mother’s escapades.

~Amazon summary

 I thought this one was pure fun. It reminded me of telling my own children stories that I made up on the fly. “Once upon a time there was a princess named Maria who lived in a BIG castle with her mother the queen, her father the king, and her eighteen brothers and sisters . . .” My stories always began with those words and went on to ramble about in much the same way Meg’s stories do. Throughout the book Thomas and Emily are ambivalent and unsure as to whether or not Meg is telling the real story of her past friendship with their mother the queen or whether she is just stringing them along to get their help with all the pre-party preparations. Could there really have been a dragon living at their castle in the past? Were Mom and Meg really tennis partners? Are there alligators in the moat? Fairies in the woods?The reader is just as uncertain as the children are, and just as anxious to hear the rest of the story.

There is an ongoing question as to whether or not Meg might be a witch, but it’s never really resolved, and she doesn’t cast spells or do anything witchy. This middle grade fiction story is fun and adventurous, mildly ridiculous, with no really deep questions or themes, except maybe the reunification of old friends. I loved it.

Racing Storm Mountain by Trent Reedy

Sep28

I just finished reading this 2022 middle grade fiction novel, second in a series of middle grade adventure books set in the fictional town of McCall, Idaho near McCall Mountain (The series is called McCall Mountain, with a new book Fishing in Fire set to come out in February, 2023.). I liked the first book in the series, Hunter’s Choice, but I really liked this second book. It speaks to a demographic that is neglected in most contemporary children’s literature: rural, adventure-loving, lower class, flyover country.

I enjoyed it even though it’s about snowmobile racing, a sport that I didn’t even know existed. Folks, I’m from Houston now, originally West Texas; we don’t have winter sports. Therefore, I wouldn’t know whether the many details in the book about snowmobiles and avalanches and frostbite are perfect or not, but it reads as if the author knows what he’s writing about. To write an adventure sports survival story set in West Texas, you would have to include tornadoes, or deserts, or bucking broncos, and I might know a little more about the situation.

The writing is quite good, and the kids talk like middle school kids. The conflict of rich vs. poor, popular vs. loser, and the idea of privilege shown from a different than expected perspective make this a standout. I especially liked one scene in which the main characters discuss what it means to be privileged and whether or not we are responsible for our own plight or privilege in life. It’s open-ended, but meant to get readers to think without telling them what to think.

Bottom line, Racing Storm Mountain is just a good read: a survival story about three middle school kids stranded in a snowstorm on a mountain. Hunter, Swann, and Kelton must work together to survive despite their very different backgrounds and experiences.

Thanks, Mr. Reedy, for another solid and enjoyable reading adventure. Oh, Words in the Dust is another book, this one set in Afghanistan, by Trent Reedy that I recommend.

Haven: Small Cat’s Big Adventure by Megan Wagner Lloyd

Sep27

Haven the cat lives in a small house in the woods with Ma Millie, her elderly friend and rescuer. Haven is strictly an indoor cat ever since Ma Millie took her in, and her life is splendid. “Ma Millie’s house was wholly and completely home.”

But when Ma Millie becomes ill, Haven must figure out how to help her. How can a little cat, a cat who is afraid of and unused to the outside world, find help for her beloved human? And can Haven trust the fox without a name who offers to help?

Short (only 131 pages), sweet and poignant, this story is nevertheless well written and developed with a villainous bobcat, a helpful fox, and a tiny courageous cat. It’s reminiscent of Incredible Journey and even Charlotte’s Web, but the inclusion of human characters and animals with some human characteristics and language, makes it relatable and more than just another animal story. The plot is well knit together; the writing is good, but not too complicated; and the ending is satisfying. Sensitive children might need a warning or a pre-reader since injury and even death are elements of the story.

I highly recommend this one for cat lovers, fans of animal stories in general, young adventurers, and anyone looking for a readalike book after enjoying: Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White, The Incredible Journey by Sheila Burnford, James Herriot’s Animal Stories for Children, Along Came a Dog by Meindert DeJong, A Wolf Called Wander by Roseanne Parry, or The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden. Alternatively, if you read Haven and want more animal friendship stories, one of these might fit the bill.

Vivid (The Color Theory #1) by Ashley Bustamante

Sep26

All of the people left on Earth live together on a protected island run by those who manifest some sort of color magic as children and by those magical adults who become Benefactors, protectors of the world on this island. Ava’s goal as she studies in her school Prism has always been to become a Benefactor someday. So, there are three kinds of color magic:

  • Red Augmenters have magic that affects the body: healing, strengthening, and increasing agility and speed.
  • Blue Shaper magic changes and makes objects, technology, building and re-forming things into different things.
  • Yellow Mentalists, however are dangerous. They can work on, even control, others’ thoughts and emotions. Yellow, the color and the magic associated with it, has been outlawed, and practitioners of yellow magic have disappeared from the island. They are exiled or perhaps destroyed?

This book is firmly in the Young Adult camp. There’s an on again-off again romance building throughout the novel, and it reads like a very teenage-y, somewhat ridiculous, romantic entanglement in the eyes of this sixty-five year old grandmother. (Not a criticism. If you’re a teen girl, you may fall hard for Ava’s love interest, Elm.) Ava indeed does fall for the “bad boy”, only maybe he’s not a bad boy at all. But he is a Yellow magic mentalist, so maybe he’s manipulating her mind? Ick! Is he good or bad? Can Ava trust him or not? That’s a lot of the plot and tension in the entire story.

I enjoyed the book, but I never could get over my discomfort with the idea that Yellow magic people could manipulate other people’s thoughts and feelings. How would you ever know if what you were feeling or thinking was real and accurate if that’s the case? I think this is exactly why God gives us free will; our responses have to be our own, and we have to know that our loves and and beliefs are not coerced. Otherwise, nothing can be trusted to be real or meaningful or logical.

So, although the premise of the story is catchy, and the writing is decent, I’m having trouble staying on the train. Maybe the second book in the series will explain more. And maybe the romantic part of the story will be just a little more mature? I don’t mean explicit, just less angsty, more carefully considered.

Overall, it’s a decent start to a possibly good series. You might want to wait for the next installment, or if you like clean bad boy romances, you could go ahead and jump in now.

The Wonderland Trials by Sara Ella

Sep17

The Wonderland Trials (The Curious Realities Book 1) by Sara Ella. Enclave Publishing, 2022.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is one of those love/hate it kinds of books. I happen to love it, and now I want to reread it after finishing The Wonderland Trials, a “love letter to Alice and fairy tales and children’s literature and games,” according to the author. Trials is not only a love letter, it’s a Christian love letter, not obvious or preachy, but bringing up Biblical concepts and allusions in an artful and intriguing way. And that makes me think the author and I would have much in common if we were to enjoy a nice cup of tea together.

Still, I’m from Texas, not London, and my cup of tea would probably be a glass of sweet iced tea. Ms. Ella, on the other hand, lives in Arizona and as a young person she immersed herself in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland, not just Carroll’s Alice. Her American nationality shows. The story is good, but the references to British culture are sometimes a bit off. Do people really eat Yorkshire pudding for dessert? And I caught at least a couple of instances of words that were slightly misused. Can you concur when no one has said anything to concur or agree with in the first place?

Nevertheless, I found a lot to like about this story of a girl named Alice who makes a journey into Wonderland to search for the lost competitors in the Wonder Trials. The sense of confusion and nonsense and riddle that pervades the story made my head ache just a little–along with Alice. And I’m still not sure where this journey is taking us as readers any more than I know where Alice and the other members of Team Heart are going. This is only Book 1, and it ends . . . unfinished. I’m not fond of cliffhangers, especially if I enjoyed the story.

And I did enjoy this story despite its minor glitches, so I’ll make an exception. Alice is an interesting, well-rounded protagonist, and her love interest Chess Shire is intriguing and a bit mysterious. Oh, yes, this book is firmly in the Young Adult speculative fiction camp, but also clean and romantic in a playful way. It’s just right for the 13-17 year old crowd, which happens to be the age group of most of the team players and main characters.

By the way, why is a raven like a writing desk?

The Ogress and the Orphans by Kelly Barnhill

Sep12

I read Kelly Barnhill’s The Girl Who Drank the Moon a few years ago and liked it, although I probably wouldn’t have awarded it the Newbery Medal. However, I wasn’t on the committee, and those people who were, did think it the best of the year (2016). The Ogress and the Orphans is much better, IMHO, and should be a contender for this year’s Newbery Award.

Stone-in-the-Glen was once a lovely community, “famous for its trees”, with people who shared the fruit of those trees and spent a great deal of time “discussing literature or politics or philosophy or art” in a leisurely manner as they worked together to care for one another and to share ideas.

“But then, one terrible night, the Library burned.”

This middle grade speculative fiction book tells a very book-centric, literature loving story. As for characters, there are a gentle ogress, fourteen orphans who live in an orphanage with an elderly couple to take care of them, a menagerie of assorted townspeople, a murder of crows, a blinded dog, a charismatic mayor, and a very unpleasant dragon. Oh, and a mysterious, maybe magical narrator.

The writing in this book is beautiful, maybe a bit too precious at times, but I didn’t mind. And the story itself could have been hurried along a bit without losing much, if any, of its charm, but I didn’t mind that either. To tell the truth, I wanted it to last. I enjoyed spending time with the Ogress and with Anthea and Bartleby and Cass and all the other orphans. And all the book-love was, well, music to my ears.

. . . the Orphan House’s collection was surprisingly large–there were more books than the space seemed to allow.  This is not unusual.  Books, after all, have their own peculiar gravity, given the collective weight of words and thoughts and ideas.  Just as the gravitational field around a black hole bends and wobbles the space around it, so, too, does the tremendous mass of ideas of a large collection of books create its own dense gravity.  Space gets funny around books.

The world is filled with goodness, and our response should not be silence and suspicion. You have a responsibility to be grateful. You have a responsibility to do good as a result.

So maybe the Reading Room is magic because books really are magic. I read once that books bend both space and time, and the more books you have in one place, the more space and time will bend and twist and fold over itself. I’m not sure if that’s true but it feels true. Of course, I read that in a book, and maybe the book was just bragging.

Adventures with Waffles by Maria Parr

Sep2

Lena is Trille’s best friend, but he’s not really sure if he is Lena’s best friend. Lena reminds me of The Cat in Miranda and The Cat; she’s independent and feisty, full of ideas, not so prone to intimate confidences and expressions of affection. Lena is also reminiscent of Pippi Longstocking; she’s a bit of a rebel. Of course, the Scandinavian setting recalls Pippi, too. (Adventures with Waffles is from a Norwegian author, while Pippi Longstocking is Swedish. But the setting is similar.)

This book is funny, and I think there is dearth of truly funny children’s books being published these days. Lots of great quests and problem novels and bathroom humor crowd the shelves, but to find a good, funny read-aloud-worthy story, you almost have to go back to Ramona Quimby or Homer Price or Sid Fleischman’s western adventure stories (By The Great Horn Spoon, The Ghost in the Noonday Sun). What all of these disparate books have in common is a sense of humor that depends on ordinary, everyday absurdities instead of shock value and silly talk.

The book also deals with sadness and loss. A favorite character in the book dies, and at a certain point in the story Trille thinks his friendship with Lena is over. Both losses are told about in a compassionate and realistic way that would help readers to identify with Trille, the protagonist, in his grief. And there’s lots of trouble as Lena’s ideas for fun and adventure are not devoid of ridiculous and even dangerous consequences. A picture of Jesus becomes a sort of talisman for remembering what has been lost in terms of family and friendship and for renewing the relationships that remain.

I have been told by more than one friend that Ms. Parr’s other middle grade fiction book, Astrid the Unstoppable is even better than Adventures with Waffles. So, I plan to check that one out as soon as possible. In the meantime, I recommend Adventures with Waffles to fans of Ramona Quimby and Pippi Longstocking and Anne of Green Gables and other spirited and slightly wacky fictional girl characters.

Miranda and the Cat by Linell Smith

Sep1

Once there was a Cat. He was not a fat cat. He was not the lap-sitting kind of cat. He was a thin cat; so thin that you could count his bones. This Cat was marked with the scars of many battles. He lived in a turned-over box behind a garbage can in the alley of a big city. In fact, he was an alley cat. And proud of it.

Miranda and the Cat is the simple story of a girl who finds and befriends a cat, an independent, feisty, alley cat. The Cat is never named in the book, perhaps because The Cat doesn’t ever belong to Miranda or anyone else. No one has the right to name him or contain him. He’s The Cat.

Nevertheless, Miranda and The Cat do become friends, friends with boundaries, but friends who love and care for each other in times of need. Miranda and the Cat is just a lovely 44 page story of how two of God’s creatures can be friends–with both respect and love.

Linell Nash Smith, the author of this little story, was the daughter of poet Ogden Nash. Linell actually illustrated a couple of picture books of Ogden Nash’s poems. But for this book there is a separate illustrator. The illustrator, Peggy (Margaret Frances) Bacon, did such a good job of capturing the personality and moxie of The Cat. I’m glad someone decided have her illustrate the story. I’m going to be pushing this little book at all of the cat lovers who come to my library from now on.

Camel Express by Olive Burt

Aug23

Camel Express: A Story of the Jeff Davis Experiment by Olive Burt is one of the many books in the Winston Adventure series, “a series of tales based on the little-known incidents and nearly forgotten lives of unsung heroes that helped shape history.” Several of the characters in the book were actual people who were key figures in the so-called camel experiment.

Our main protagonist is Obed Green, sixteen years old, newly arrived in Texas at Matagorda Bay from a voyage on the U.S. Navy ship Supply to Turkey and North Africa in search of camels to purchase for the U.S. government’s use on the frontier. Obed goes as assistant to the ship’s veterinarian, Albert Ray, and on the way back Obed learns from the Syrian camel driver, Haj Ali (called Hi Jolly by all the Americans), how to care for camels, and even how to love and appreciate the ungainly and temperamental animals.

Yes, in 1855, Congress appropriated $30,000 to carry out a scheme of Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, to purchase camels for use in the American desert. There’s a foreword in the book where Ms. Burt tells readers the history of Jeff Davis’ camel experiment, but let it suffice to say, the importation of camels to frontier forts was not a raging success. And then came the Civil War, and the camels were mostly lost or forgotten.

And that’s why, in one of my favorite children’s books from last year, we get a story-telling camel living in the wild in West Texas. Once Upon a Camel by Kathi Appelt is a fantastical story with anthropomorphized animals, and Camel Express is a western adventure story, so the two are very different in tone and genre. Nevertheless, I feel as if the two books would make a good pair, read together, and discussion would ensue. Just the idea of camels roaming the country of my birth, West Texas and parts west, makes me smile. If you read either or both books, let me know your smile quotient.

Alone on a Wide Wide Sea by Michael Morpurgo

Aug19

This middle grade or young adult novel, by the author of War Horse and Private Peaceful and many other excellent titles, takes place in Australia—and on the ocean. Part 1 of the book is The Story of Arthur Hobhouse, a British orphan who at the tender age of six years old is sent to Australia to live with foster parents in an orphanage in Cooper’s Station. Arthur’s story has its ups and downs, some of it quite harrowing. There’s child abuse, and outback survival, and the sad death of one of the main characters, which is why maybe the book is more for older teens and adults. But it’s a good and ultimately hopeful story, and I liked the fact that almost none of the characters in the book is all good or all bad. They are a mixture for the most part (except for the main villain with an appropriate name, Piggy Bacon).

Part 2 is The Voyage of the Kitty Four, the story of how Arthur’s daughter Allie takes the boat her father built for her and sails from Australia to England, alone. It’s an ocean adventure, reminiscent of one of my favorite true life adventure stories, The Boy Who Sailed ‘Round the World Alone (aka Dove) by Robin Graham. Allie’s story also has ups and downs, not just on waves, but also in her emotional state as she faces the dangers of sea by herself and learns to rely on her own resources.

There’s some hostility to religion and Christianity in the book since Arthur’s first experiences of “Christianity” are horrifying and anything but Christlike. There’s also a bit of superstition—because if you can’t rely on God then you might tend to look for signs and wonders, right? But these things all made the book more rich and understandable for me. People do have bad experiences with abusive, religious people, and sometimes an albatross could be a sign of God’s love and protection. Allie and Arthur both have a deep love for Colerige’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, so that’s a thread throughout both stories.

Good book by a very good author. I’ve enjoyed all of the books by Michael Morpurgo that I’ve read.