Starting to Read

Posted on October 2, 2013 by Katy K.

Well, probably no one except other librarians would find it exciting that I’ve spent the last couple of days figuring out how to make Excel sit up and beg and tell me how well my language learning materials are doing in percentage checked out and circs per year. Sexy, right? Also, we had issues with the drains, which reminded me of old-school British children’s lit.

Anyway, since the review I started Saturday still isn’t done, I thought I’d tell you that I finally have The Dream Thieves to listen to (I’m loving it so far, but that might not be surprising.) And Song of the Quarkbeast came in on hold (as well as a book on performing early music that may be exciting only to me). I found the latest Merrie Haskell on the shelf, too, and I can’t even remember all other the lovely books I have waiting for me at home.

What are you reading, or looking forward to reading?

Posted in books, Personal | Tagged , | 4 Comments

City of Glass

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Katy K.

Continuing on with the best-selling teen urban fantasy series…

cityofglassCity of Glass. Mortal Instruments Book 3. by Cassandra Clare.
As our story opens, Clary is packing for her first trip to Alicante, capital of the historic home of the Shadowhunters in Idris. There, she plans to look for the magician who wrote the spell that’s keeping her mother asleep, as he’s likely to be the only one who can break it. Jace, though, thinks it’s too dangerous for her to go, when their evil father Valentine is sure to be heading there next. Hoping to convince Simon to help keep Clary in New York, Jace asks Simon to meet him at the New York Institute. But plans go badly awry, and all our major characters, including vampire Simon and werewolf Luke end up in an Idris that’s feeling very unfriendly towards outsiders.

At the house where our favorite teen Shadowhunters Alec, Isabelle and Jace are staying, Clary meets Alec’s cousin Sebastian. Seeing him instantly calls to mind the dark, tortured prince she’d been drawing in the manga series she’d been working on at home, and she consents to let him help her in the search for the only magician in Idris. What she finds are hosts of secrets that affect nearly everyone she knows.

Meanwhile, Valentine visits the Assembly and presents them with an ultimatum: put him in charge, or he will attack with powerful demons and bring down all of Alicante. While all of the New York Shadowhunters know that this is a snare, Alec is the only one of age and therefore able to attend council meetings – will his voice be enough to convince the Assembly?

All this time, Clary and Jace are fighting their forbidden feelings towards each other. They know they’re siblings, but they just can’t stop being attracted to each in other in a deep, romantic way. Finally in this book, Clare is able to resolve this storyline, which has been going on since the first book. The solution feels in retrospect like it contradicts some of the story we got in the first book, but was neat enough that I didn’t really mind. In any case, the final showdown is so spectacular that it’s hard to even notice a minor inconsistency from two books ago.

I started reading this series after I read the prequel series, and it was really clear how much Clare’s writing skill and her knowledge of the Shadowhunter world had grown since she started the first book when I went back to it. Now, in the third book, I notice her skill improving in the first series (if that makes sense.) It’s still a world of danger and drama that feels full of pulpy excitement, but with the underlying message that family is the people we count on most. Sometimes it’s the family you’re born with, and sometimes you make your own family.

I’m now on hold for the fourth book and wondering where Clare will go with the story from here.

Posted in books | Tagged , , | 2 Comments

Friends with Boys

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Katy K.

I’d been hearing good buzz about this teen graphic novel since before it was published last year, and finally actually checked it out.

Friends with BoysFriends with Boys by Faith Erin Hicks.
Maggie is the youngest of five and the only girl. All of the kids were homeschooled until high school, and Maggie, just about to start, is decidedly nervous. She doesn’t know how to be friends with girls and misses her mother, who’s left home. Her brothers start off trying to let her find her own way, leaving Maggie even more alone. She’s approached by punkish Lucy and her brother Alistair, and confused by the animosity of the cool volleyball team captain towards both Alistair and her oldest brother. There’s a touch of the supernatural as Maggie is haunted by the ghost of a 19th century sea captain’s wife, echoing Maggie’s own feelings of loss and confusion. We don’t really know why the mother has left, or if she’s left permanently or temporarily: she’s just gone.

Even with ghosts, a missing mother, and jocks with superiority complexes, the story is far from depressing. It’s all mixed with a good dose of humor from all parties. The scene that had both my love and I snorting involves Maggie, Lucy and Alistair going to see a late-night showing of Alien together. Maggie and Alistair have both seen it already and like it, but Lucy has never seen it and isn’t a fan of horror movies to begin with. The page is filled with panels showing the three watching the movie. Maggie sits, smiling slightly, through the whole thing. Alistair looks blasé. In between the two of them, Lucy watches in squirming horror, changing every panel.

I am oversimplifying the whole book here, as we have time to get to know all of the brothers, and for the friends to get involved in adventures as well as simple school and movies. This totally lived up to the hype, and my love and I both thoroughly enjoyed it. While it’s appeal isn’t limited to teen girls, as most Western graphic novels seem to be skewed male, this is a good one to remember for solid girl appeal.

Posted in books | Tagged | 2 Comments

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again

Posted on September 23, 2013 by Katy K.

I’m always on the lookout for exciting chapter books that will grab my boy’s attention – and a flying car pursued by a powerful villain certainly fits the bill.

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies AgainChitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again by Frank Cottrell Boyce. Illustrated by Joe Berger.
Ian Fleming, of James Bond fame, wrote the original Chitty Chitty Bang Bang book way back when. This is a licensed new series, featuring the same beloved car (more or less) and a new family. The Tooting family’s father has just been laid off, and the thoughtful mother, in car sales, buys him an old camper van as a summer project to keep him from filling the house with his well-meant but less than successful home improvements. The family consists of the two parents (of different skin shades, noticeable only in the drawings), 15-year-old Lucy, 2 or 3-year-old Little Harry, and Jeremy-who-‘d-rather-go-by Jem, in between Lucy and Little Harry. Jem starts working on the car with Mr. Tooting, and they go to an old junk yard and find a powerful engine that they put in the car. As they work on the car, the family makes a list of all the places they’d like to travel in their van: Paris, Cairo, El Dorado, and dinosaurs. When the van is finally fixed up and they take it for a test drive, it starts driving on its own, first stop Paris. But is the van trying to fulfill their wishes, or is the engine trying to find all the pieces of the magnificent classic car it used to be?

This book is hilarious and suspenseful, as the Tooting family is pursued by a nefarious villain who will stop at nothing to get the car back for himself. I loved the characters, each one with his or her own strengths, and the plot device that allowed the kids to be in charge without their parents being painted as complete idiots. Lucy, for example, loves black and death and depressing things, but has spent the time locked in her room studying all sorts of arcane topics that turn out to be useful to their quest. Jem is good at mechanics and listening to people, while Little Harry (who felt much more like a two-year-old than the three the text puts him at) has that great toddler skill of noticing things that adults and older children don’t. There might not be much in the way of character arcs, but I’ve read many books that took themselves much more seriously without putting as much effort into making the characters come to life. The dialogue had me reading bits out loud quite frequently, and the spot illustrations really add to the book – one of my favorites showed the Mr. and Mrs. Tooting kissing for the camera, while the children look on in various states of disgust and embarrassment. This is a great choice for middle-grade students of both genders, and one I’m longing to read to my boy.

Posted in books | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

The Garden Intrigue

Posted on September 20, 2013 by Katy K.

Back to trying to finish series – I read The Secret History of the Pink Carnation when it first came out, and have read and enjoyed several more in the series, but somehow fell behind. At this point, I have only to read the Christmas entry, The Mischief of the Mistletoe, and this year’s new release, The Passion of the Purple Plumeria.

The Garden Intrigue
The Garden Intrigue by Lauren Willig. Read by Kate Reading.
The premise of this series is that in the era of the Scarlet Pimpernel, a league of female British spies worked to help save French nobles and prevent a possible French invasion of England, all set within the frame story of an American grad student, Eloise, who’s researching the spies, and her romance with the British noble, Colin, the spies’ modern-day descendant. Augustus Whittlesby has been a recurring comic character in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century. He’s a British spy embedded in the French court as a really awful poet, who doesn’t even need to encrypt his reports back home because he just writes them into the excessively long poems. Emma Delagardie is good friends with Jane, Augustus’s contact, but doesn’t know about Jane’s spy work. She’s a young American widow, disowned by her family when she eloped and married a Frenchman, and who hides her brains and her grief behind the front of a sparkling socialite. Not incidentally, she has been close friends with Bonaparte’s stepdaughter Hortense since they were in school together. In that capacity, she’s asked to write a masque for the newly-minted emperor’s upcoming garden party. A big military invention of some sort is supposed to be unveiled at that event, so Augustus volunteers to help Emma write as a means of securing an invitation. There’s both passion and intrigue in plenty as they both discover the real people beneath the society masks. Meanwhile, in 2004, Colin has been forced to allow a movie to be filmed on his beloved family estate, while Eloise is facing the looming deadline of the end of her fellowship abroad.

I really love Willig’s blending of historical spy adventure with romance in all of these books. This entry in the series felt a little lower on the adrenaline than some others, which is fine by me, a little higher on humor and a bit less spicy on the romance – just as much passion, but less explicit. I’m like both ways just fine, but I think the more conservative descriptions fit the feeling of the books a little better. Eloise and Colin’s story has been spread out slowly over the course of many books while the historical couples each find their match in one, but this book requires Eloise to give some serious thoughts to her personal and professional goals. Kate Reading does a good job of reading – mostly delightfully British, but with plenty of French and American accents thrown in for good measure. This is still lovely escapist fiction, perfect for those looking for a historical romp.

Posted in books | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Water

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Katy K.

During my daughter’s first post-transplant bout of tummy flu, I learned that it’s best for parents of transplant kids to just keep a hospital overnight bag packed in the closet. (I know the audience for this useful tip is very small, but I’m putting it out there anyway.) My bag of course includes books for both of us as well as toothbrushes and changes of clothes. I’ve been slowly working on this short story collection, leaving it in the bag and reading a story or two during my daughter’s hospital visits, which are very happily increasingly rare. Now that it’s done, I think I need to find another book in a similar vein to have at the ready.

WaterWater by Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson.
This is the first of the three Elementals collections. Both authors also collaborated on Fire and, after McKinley turned had one too many short story ideas turn into a novel, Dickinson finished the series with Earth and Air in single volume. (That’s the only one I haven’t read and the obvious choice for my next short story book.) There are three stories by each author, all providing strong characters interacting with (or being) some water-related mythological creature. There are mermaids, kraken, sea serpents and water horses. One of McKinley’s stories involves a person from modern-day like-Britain trying to believe enough to journey to the Damar of ancient legend. As I’ve come to expect, McKinley tells lyrical stories with lots of descriptive backgrounds where the characters are able to find happiness. Dickinson’s stories are just as beautiful but darker, here featuring an abused girl in one story and doomed lovers whose dive into the ocean brings up a kraken from the depths in another. I’m being minimal here partly because I read this over the course of a couple of years and partly because I’m short on time and would like to keep moving with my reviews, but these stories really do make me think of a necklace strung with individual, beautiful pearls. They manage to mix serious topics and old myths to come up with something beautiful and fresh.

Posted in books | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook

Posted on September 18, 2013 by Katy K.

This is one that my husband found. It’s a graphic novel featuring extra-geeky science kids – what could be better?

Secret Science AllianceThe Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis.
Julian Calendar is a brainy geek, and he knows it. He’s never had a friend, but he’s just starting at a new school, and hopes that if he pretends to be a normal kid and hides his brains that he’ll be able to fit in. Naturally, his attempts go poorly – he asks people about sports that aren’t in season and sometimes forgets himself in class and starts giving over-the-top answers to science or math problems. But – after getting over trying to be normal – he answers a coded message and meets up with two equally smart kids from his school. Both of them can hide at school, but are still full of great ideas. Greta Hughes is a prankster who hides a camera system in the back of her ever-present bike helmet, while Ben is a very tall basketball star. Together, they form the Secret Science Alliance. They have a secret hideout underneath a vacant lot, accessed by an elevator in an old dog house where they work on their inventions: the Koblovsky Copter (named for the town’s fictional famous inventor), Nightsneak Goggles, and lots of things for practical joking. But when a famous living inventor steals their invention notebook and plans to use their inventions to steal valuable items from the town museum, run by Greta’s father, they have to take action, even if it means sneaking out after bedtime.

This is a truly top-notch graphic novel. We truly get to know all the characters, and the plot started mostly believably and ramped up to kids saving their idea and the museum in a way that made it very hard to put down. It’s never stressed, but Greta is African-American and Ben seems Hispanic, so it’s clear but unstated that braininess isn’t confined to white boys. Davis uses geeky innovations on the standard comic book style that I just loved – the pie-chart diagram of the inside of Julian’s head, for example, with all the geeky percentages labeled and maps and diagrams of places whenever helpful. In a small but instantly understandable touch, she draws overlapping word bubbles if someone is talking and no one else is listening. I was a little surprised that the subject of patenting their inventions never came up, and more than a little disappointed to find that the Secret Science Alliance has had no further adventures. Nevertheless, this is a great book to give to the young geeks in your life. I read it aloud to our son, and it was so fun that it prompted cries of “Aww” and requests for one more chapter whenever it was time to stop.

Posted in books | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Cold Steel

Posted on September 10, 2013 by Katy K.

Many apologies for my silence, dear readers! Crazy busy is not new, but at least entertaining: At work, I’m very busy getting ready for my big Talk Like a Pirate Day event, featuring a treasure hunt through downtown. This involves me trying to write rhyming clues for people to find the right shops, and my poetry skills, if I ever had them, are very rusty. At home, my daughter is getting old enough to move to her own room. Clearing out the room that’s been our study for the last 10 years is challenging enough, and left me without my computer for several days. Then, in repainting the walls, we discovered that the windows have to be stripped completely down, as they’ve been painted so often that the paint only sticks to itself and then comes off in sheets. Now our nice long-weekend project has turned into one that we’ll be lucky to have finished in a month. So, back to books. Much more fun – this is jumping back in time a little to the nice fat book I took on vacation with me.

Cold SteelCold Steel. Spiritwalker Trilogy Book 3. by Kate Elliott.
This is the last book in the trilogy that began with Cold Fire. That leaves it with a lot of loose ends to tie up: can Cat rescue her husband Vai from her sire, the Master of the Wild Hunt? What does her sire want from her anyway? If she frees Vai from the Spirit World, can she then free him from his masters in the mortal world, the mages of Four Moons House? Will she get revenge against the fire mage, James Drake, who made her life so difficult in the last book? Which of Bea’s many suitors will she choose, and will she survive to choose any of them? And should Cat stop or aid Camjiata, the Napoleon-like general who’s trying to conquer Europe, promising a more equitable legal code for everyone? Also, it turns out that Cat’s actions at the end of the last book – which succeeded in saving Bea from her sire – have caused chaos in both the mortal and spirit worlds, for which she’s being held responsible.

This is another big journey, starting in the Caribbean and ranging all over Europe and multiple cultures’ parts of the Spirit World. The cast of characters is large, but vivid enough that I was able to keep track of them with only a little mental effort. Both the wide-ranging plot and large casts are things that can bother me – I really have too many things going on in my head at one time to have much patience with authors who want me to put the effort of a college course into their world. But Elliott does a great job keeping the plot focused around our main characters even as they have their fingers in many, many pots, and never lost my interest along the way. Cat is still stubborn and full of ideas that may or may not be good, but which she will definitely have to try before she can be talked out of them. She’s also an extremely amorous person, but her attentions are all focused on her husband and not described in romance-novel detail, making this good for teens and adults who don’t want to intrude in the bedroom. And even though Vai is the love of her life, I love that her closest family – cousin raised as sister Bea and brother Rory stay primary in her life: It’s just as much Cat and Bea against the world as it is Cat and Vai. This was a satisfying end to the trilogy, and a book I’m happy to have on my shelf.

Posted in books | Tagged , | 7 Comments

Odd Duck

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Katy K.

It’s a Kid Lit Blog Hop Wednesday! Happy Hopping, everyone!

Kid Lit Blog Hop

Odd DuckOdd Duck by Cecil Castellucci and Sara Varon.
This is a graphic novel/ early chapter book hybrid full of the quirky charm I’ve come to expect from Castellucci (Boy Proof). I’d never read anything else by Varon until, just while writing this review, I pulled Chicken and Cat, a nearly wordless picture book off the shelf and looked through it – more quirky charm! But on to the story:

Theodora doesn’t have many friends, but she considers herself a perfectly normal duck who just likes her routines. She likes to swim with a teacup on her head to practice grace and balance, and prefers her duck food with mango salsa on top. She also likes to stay in her house for the winter, even when all the other ducks fly south. Then a new duck moves into the house next door. Chad is definitely odd – he dyes his feathers bright colors, plays loud music, and spends his time building large sculptures out of found objects rather than repairing his house. Theodora, very proper in her own way, is initially very put off, but when Chad also stays behind for the winter, they strike up a friendship. It turns out they have a lot in common after all, including their mutual passion for astronomy. Their newfound friendship is rocked to the core, though, when they overhear another duck calling one of them “an odd duck.” Which one of them is the odd duck??

I’d read several good reviews of this before I was able to take it home, and I wasn’t disappointed. The descriptions of all of the ways the two ducks break out of the proper duck mold are very amusing. For example, as Theodora runs her errands to the grocery store, library, and craft store, her selections are labeled and identified as normal or unique. There are even cartoon representations of the constellations labeled in the night sky. But Theodora also experiences some serious character growth, first learning to make friends and then accepting both that she is odd and that it’s ok to be different, all without feeling preachy. Varon’s art work, with bold curving lines and vintage-style pastel colors, do a lot of work helping us to feel like we, too, are close friends with Theodora and Chad. The words, while few, are carefully chosen and the slightly above-average vocabulary that one would expect of a well-read duck like Theodora. While the story is delightful enough to charm adults on its own, ages four to nine feels about right for the target audience, probably read in more than one session for younger kids. This is one to celebrate with rose hip tea and funky music.

Posted in books | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

The Pirate’s Wish

Posted on September 4, 2013 by Katy K.

Pirate's WishThe Pirate’s Wish. Assassin’s Curse Book 2. by Cassandra Rose Clarke.
In the first book in this duology, our heroine and would-be pirate queen Ananna accidentally both enraged another pirate clan and magically bound the man they hired to assassinate to her, Naji. They managed to find out the three impossible tasks that it would take to break the unbreakable curse, but were trapped on a magical island with unpleasant and powerful magical beings trying to get to Naji. As this story opens, they are still stranded on the island. Ananna is repressing her unrequited romantic feelings towards Naji in favor of mutual friendship, and they are both hoping against hope for rescue. If the ship captain Ananna befriended earlier, Marjani, comes back, they can actually try to break the curse. But before Marjani arrives, Ananna runs into a manticore, a social, talking manticore princess who has been raised to view humans as prey. And the only way to keep the manticore from eating them is to promise to bring her along when they’re rescued. But rescued they are, and off they set. It was clear at the end of the first book that one of the three supposedly impossible tasks – a kiss from a true love – was not going to be impossible at all, so I was very curious about how Clarke would handle this. I was pleased with the treatment, which took care of the obvious early on in the story but yet created complications that took a good portion of the book to resolve. In the search for starstones, the next most accessible task, it’s discovered that Marjani, now a fierce sea captain, was once a high-ranking noble banished from her kingdom for the crime of falling in love with the princess. But the princess is now queen, and queen of a kingdom that at least at one time had starstones in its treasury. The third task, creating life out of destruction, seems truly impossible, and so keeps getting put off while other things come up.

The whole book is somewhat episodic because of the nature of the quests, but this isn’t usually something that bothers me and it didn’t here. I wanted a couple of things from this book. First, I wanted the adventure to keep up the pace from the last book, which could have been tricky because the major problem had been solved in the first book. Secondly, our beautifully strong-willed and independent heroine was at the end of the last book stuck in love with a man who didn’t return her feelings. Could Clarke bring the romance to a happy conclusion (me being a romantic at heart) without selling Ananna out? She’s already gotten rid of one perfectly acceptable fiancé because he wouldn’t let her captain her own ship – how on earth could she find a future with a sworn assassin, member of secretive and possessive organization? Happily for me as well as for Ananna, Clarke handles this aspect extremely well. Ananna is realistically hurt by rejection, believably unwilling to talk things out with Naji, but also refuses to mope and makes attempts to move on with her life. Both the romance and the quest are wrapped up in delightfully original ways, with the romance especially refreshing. Though I’d certainly be happy to read more about Ananna and Naji, as of right now, this is just a two-book series, making it perfect for those who don’t like committing to long series. If “Pirate-assassin adventure-romance” sounds appealing to you, this short series is a lot of carefully crafted fun.

Posted in books | Tagged , , | Leave a comment