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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The Girl Who Chased the Moon

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Katy K.

Now that I’ve read this and the author’s most recent book, The Peach Keeper, I can cross her off of my unfinished series and authors list.

The Girl Who Chased the Moon
The Girl Who Chased the Moon by Sarah Addison Allen.

I adored Allen’s first book, Garden Spells, and have been picking up her books on and off since then. They’re mostly set in modern-day North Carolina, with little bits of magic woven into the otherwise ordinary world. In this book, teenaged Emily Benedict moves back to her mother’s home town of Mullaby, North Carolina, following her mother’s unexpected death. She’s never met her reclusive but actual giant of a grandfather before, and knows nothing of the scandal that caused her mother to leave. Next door, her mother’s former classmate, Julia Winterson, lives in a tiny second-floor apartment. She’s just running her father’s old diner to pay off the mortgage, before she goes back to New York to fulfill her dream of opening up her own bakery. Even though there are many good reasons not to reach out to Emily, Julia does: Julia was an outcast and Emily’s mother ran with the popular girls. And Julia can never forget the boy and the memories she ran away from before she left Mullaby herself. Still, Julia’s cakes with their cutting-edge flavors have been gaining a following in Mullaby, and her cakes send the smell of love and hope through the air, whatever their flavor. Meanwhile, Emily sees from her window the mysterious Mullaby lights that appear only in the dark, and makes friends with the handsome Win Coffey, decidedly against his father’s wishes. Another touch of magic comes from the wallpaper in Emily’s room, which used to be her mother’s: it changes to reflect what it thinks the occupant needs. Some days, it’s fluttering butterflies, others, snow-covered pine trees.

So twenty-year-old problems are resolved, and there’s romance and reconciliation for both of our female leads. The only thing that really struck a false note for me was when Win confessed that he had been sneaking into Emily’s bedroom at night to watch her sleep, and she doesn’t find this creepy. Memo to authors: breaking into people’s houses to watch them is creepy, stalkerish behavior. It is not romantic. Stop doing it. Aside from that, this had just the right notes of integrating past and present in a slightly magical, feel-good story that made a perfect summer read.

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The Cats of Tanglewood Forest

Posted on August 28, 2013 by Katy K.

The Cats of Tanglewood ForestThe Cats of Tanglewood Forest by Charles De Lint. Illustrated by Charles Vess.
I was slightly hesitant when checking out this book, as animal fantasy has never really been my thing. However – Charles De Lint and Charles Vess! De Lint of course is a fantasy great (my first introduction to him was his Jack of Kinrowan duology, part of Terri Windling’s Fairy Tale series, but.) Vess may be less familiar to my readers, but he is a graphic novel artist great and has illustrated such things as Neil Gaiman’s Stardust. (His style is somewhat similar to one of my favorite picture-book artists Trina Schart Hyman.) Put the two of them together and you can’t help but get a magical book. It’s not a graphic novel – much like Stardust, it’s told in prose with frequent watercolor paintings, large and small, but all beautiful.

Our story is set in an indeterminate time near a rural mountain town, with a nearby Native American tribe. Orphaned Lillian lives with her Aunt on a small farm, mostly on their own but with some dealings both with the town and the tribe. Lillian really wants to see fairies, and after her farm work is done, she goes out into the nearby forest, leaving small gifts of food for the fairies and for the oldest apple tree in the orchard, even though all she sees are ordinary birds and animals, and large numbers of wild cats. One day, she falls asleep in the forest after chasing a deer. Still sleeping, she is bitten by a poisonous snake. The wild cats feel sorry for her – they having drunk most of the milk left out for the fairies – and decide to brave the wrath of the ancient cat father to save her life. Except that the only way they can do so is by turning her into a cat. And the only problem with that is that poor heartbroken Aunt doesn’t recognize Lillian in her cat form. However, Lillian’s journey to set things right again isn’t the straightforward quest that it first seems to be. Simply turning human again is easily accomplished, but only makes the situation worse and requires her to try again, and then again. On the way, she meets several characters who try to help her, including some brothers from the neighboring tribe and T.H. Reynolds the fox. There are wise old women of multiple traditions – some more sympathetic and helpful than others – including Old Mother Possum, Aunt Nancy of the Crow tribe and Mother Manan of the Bear people. These last two helped to navigate the treacherous waters of Wise and Innocent Native Persons, by being decidedly not innocent rivals engaged in an ancient feud. That being said, I was still not entirely comfortable that the waters had been entirely successfully navigated.

It’s pretty obvious from the premise that the book deals with death – but there is not a lot of violence otherwise, and nothing in the way of romance. Its easiest target audience is the middle grade cat-loving girl. However, it is less full of cats than the cover and title would indicate – Lillian spends most of her journeys traveling in human form and the fox character is more clearly drawn than the cats. I think there’s enough suspense to keep boys interested as well. My own boy, almost of target age, was certainly interested, and kept peering around to see the pictures as I was reading. It feels like it would make a perfect read-aloud book for him, and I plan to suggest it when we’re done with our current book. It looks like a companion novel, Seven Wild Sisters, where Lillian is the older aunt, is set for publication next winter, and I’ll keep an eye out for this as well.

I think that Charlotte liked it somewhat less well than I did; you can read her well-written opinion over at Charlotte’s Library.

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Sea Change

Posted on August 26, 2013 by Katy K.

Sea ChangeA few years ago, I was enchanted with this book trailer for Maggie Stiefvater’s Shiver, which features the ridiculous idea of a human/kraken romance. So when I read this review of an (adult) novel featuring just that, I had to read it. (Look! You can see Stiefvater’s harp in the background!)

Sea Change by S.M. Wheeler.
Lilly is the only child of the local noble, but between outclassing the neighbors and having been born with a disfiguring birthmark on her face, she’s never had any friends. Even her parents are distant and critical, both with each other and with her. She met Octavius as a child, when he was just a tiny baby kraken, small enough to hold in her hands. Now that she’s in her teens, he’s much bigger than she is, but she still spends all her free time with him, sometimes talking, sometimes exploring the nearby countryside. Even though there isn’t a physically sexual aspect to their relationship, Octavius is the most important person in her life. When he goes missing, she is distraught, and willing to do anything to get him back. The rest of this gender-bending book explores just what she means by “anything”, in a personal sacrifice kind of way. First, she makes a grueling journey to the remote mountain home of an ogress, and trades her female organs to find out where Octavius is: held captive in a too-small tank for a circus. (This book, though officially published for teens, is one of those rare books that explicitly mentions menstruation: Lilly’s somewhat upset at the lost opportunity for children, but had suffered from debilitating menstrual cramps that she’s quite happy not to be rid of.) Lilly now wears men’s clothing and goes by Lyle, and her quest turns into a kind of Firebird story, where the person who has what Lilly needs for the next step will only give it to her if she first gets another magical object from yet another person. The characters she meets include a magical tailor, a skinless witch, two bandits and their assistant automata, and a boy who used to be a donkey. The ending is not as straightforwardly happy as I would like for a character who has worked so very hard for it – but it does at least come to a place of peace, and the journey there is both thought-provoking and adventurous. I think it’s published for adults more because the tone is on the literary side and because of the squickiness of a few of the scenes – it’s low on the both the traditional violence or sex that would otherwise push a book into the adult realm.

This could also pair well with Cathrynne M. Valente’s Deathless.

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