The Language of Flowers

Posted on November 18, 2012 by Katy K.

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My friend and colleague Miss S. will leave book presents for me on my desk, sometimes for my children, and sometimes, as this one, for me.

The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Victoria was abandoned as a baby and grew up in series of foster houses and group homes.  Not surprisingly, growing up without real attachment to anyone, she’s never cared to invest herself in succeeding in school or looking for a career.  Now 18, she’s aged out of the foster care system and is on her own, homeless and with no one to turn to.  When her small start-up fund runs out, she lives under a bush in the park, making a small garden with plants she steals from around town. The flowers are her link back to the one foster mother who really cared, Elizabeth.  We learn about her past with Elizabeth in chapters that alternate with her presence, Elizabeth who understood Victoria’s prickliness and who taught her the Victorian language of flowers.  Back in the present, Victoria’s knowledge of flowers gains her a part-time job at a trendy San Francisco flower shop, Bloom, and a small room to stay in via the owner’s sister.  On early-morning flower market runs, Victoria meets Grant, who sends her messages in flowers that no one who didn’t know the language of flowers could understand.  Even when things seem to be going well, both in the past, as Elizabeth makes plans to adopt Victoria, and in the present, as Grant faithfully pursues her, things go wrong.  Most often, heart-breakingly, it’s Victoria shutting things down before she can be abandoned again.  I read this book over breaks at work, and more than once had to go and talk to Miss S. about it, how crazy that I had get back to work, leaving poor Victoria in such an unhappy situation.  It was beautiful, and heart-wrenching for me in places that are too spoilery to talk about, but though some things can never be fixed, it was in the end ultimately redemptive. 

Knowing the redemption was coming made it possible for me to finish the book.  Diffenbaugh does an amazing job of making us care about Victoria, despite the considerable effort she puts into screwing up her own life.  Normally I just get frustrated with characters like that, but it’s clear that Victoria never had the chance to learn any better.  Diffenbaugh makes it clear in the introductory material that she’s an experienced foster mother herself, and how difficult it is for foster kids who age out of the system and don’t have the support that so many young adults need to be successful.  Even though things turn out hopefully for Victoria, I was left wondering (I’m sure quite deliberately) about the many kids for whom life never improves.  Is Victoria’s story not real enough, even if I couldn’t have borne it any tougher?  In any case, this reminded me that I’m planning to knit scarves for the Red Scarf Project (at least once my kids are old enough that a scarf isn’t a four to six month commitment.), run by a foundation that provides support for former foster kids going to college.  Diffenbaugh also started the Camellia Network  to provide all kinds of support to kids aging out of the foster care system, college-bound or not.  The book is well worth reading in any case, and would be a natural pick for a book club, thoughtful without being as depressing as many book club selections seem to be.  It has some sex with consequences, which makes it appropriate for older teens as well as adults. 

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Penny and Her Song

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Katy K.

Penny and Her Song Penny and Her Song by Kevin Henkes
Henkes creates another winning little mouse character, this time in a short-chaptered easy reader book. Penny comes home from school with a Song, a song that fills her up and demands to be sung. But the mouse babies are sleeping, and her parents both tell her to be quiet. Singing to herself in the mirror or to her little glass animals is just not the same. When they finally wake up, it’s supper time, and singing at the table is also not allowed. Will Penny forget her song before she has a chance to sing it to an audience? Finally, after supper, Penny sings her song, and then teaches it to the family. Penny’s winsome personality, passionate about her need to perform without becoming pushy (this post brought to you by the letter P), together with the loving family dynamics made the parts of the book add up to more than the simple plot. The language is about the same level as Frog and Toad, the whole book two chapters long. It’s just enough for the emerging reader to feel accomplished without it moving it up to the early chapter book category. My struggling second-grader was able to read it, and my three-year-old carried it around with her and asked for it over and over again. I enjoy Henkes’ work so much that I hate to give it gender limits, but must honestly say that my son, not as interested in music and babies as my daughter, did not appreciate the story as much as she did. The second book, Penny and Her Doll, has even more girl appeal. That makes me sad for my son, but happy to see girly books that aren’t all princesses and Barbies. Those in that audience will likely love it as we did, and those looking for Kevin Henkes books to appeal to both boys and girls could try these picture book titles, a few of my favorites from his extensive catalog:

Kitten’s First Full Moon
Owen
Wemberly Worried

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Liesl and Po

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Katy K.

Liesl & PoLiesl & Po by Lauren Oliver.
Orphaned Liesl is living in the attic where her stepmother has locked her when she meets a ghost. Po is clearly a child but doesn’t remember what sex it used to be and doesn’t care anymore. It’s accompanied by Bundle, an adorable little pet ghost of indeterminate species. Liesl is instantly curious, both about Po and about how it came from the Other Side, because she never got a chance to say good-bye to her very recently deceased father. Though Po is fairly certain it can’t be possible, it finds her father on the other side, and he does have a message for Liesl. At the same time, a young alchemist’s apprentice named Will is running errands for his master, as usual, going far out of his way to look for Liesl sitting in her attic window. Chronically exhausted (like me, but with a much less adorable human alarm), he accidentally leaves the box containing the most powerful magic in the world behind at one of his stops, taking instead the box of Liesl’s father’s ashes. The magic was intended for the Lady Premiere, who is most put out when it does not work as promised. Liesl, meanwhile, steals the box of what she believes to be her father’s ashes and runs away to take them to her mother’s grave. Liesl, Po, Bundle and Will all end up on the same train out of the big city, pursued by Liesl’s stepmother, the Lady Premiere, the alchemist, and the Lady Premiere’s kind-hearted but slow-witted guard, who just wants to give poor shivering Will a warm hat.

It’s all set in a smoggy grey world of indeterminate time period, somewhen between the early 20th century and now. There are trains and factories, lots of child laborers, and the sun has not shone for a very long time. Our brave children and their ghostly friends are surrounded by looming adults, nearly all of whom wish them harm. There are no powerful adults on their side, which is sad for me as a mother, but which the children seem to take for granted. Neither Will nor Liesl has much self-confidence, but together they are able to see the strengths of the other. There’s plenty of excitement, with all the mix-ups and the chases, but it has a core of sober reflection on grief. Liesl is dealing both with the fresh grief of losing her father without being able to say good-bye, and with the older grief of losing her mother years earlier. This is handled masterfully, neither whitewashing the depth of the pain nor ever making it seem that Liesl wouldn’t be able to go on with life because of it. Oliver talks in an afterward about how this book was a reaction to loss in her own life, and it shows. I never felt like Oliver was putting her characters through unnecessarily tough times just to entertain me the reader or to get them where they next needed to be. This is dealing with a tough topic in a sensitive way, all buried under an adventure and starring characters that will appeal to both boys and girls. I’d say this is best for older elementary kids. This is a beautiful tale with staying power.

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Goldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Katy K.

Goldilocks and the Three DinosaursGoldilocks and the Three Dinosaurs by Mo Willems
Here is a picture book that had both my eight-year-old and my three-year-old giggling, looking at it on their own, and asking for it to be read aloud over and over again. In characteristic Willems style, he narrates the familiar story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears with a twist. Papa Dinosaur, Mama Dinosaur, and the small dinosaur who just happens to be visiting from Norway make delicious chocolate pudding in three temperatures and leave the house with the door open, just as a “poorly supervised” little girl named Goldilocks happens to come walking by. One might hear the sound of dinosaurs laughing as she follows the signs to the house –but really, that would be terribly unlikely. Chocolate-filled little girls are dinosaurs’ favorite treats, but Goldilocks keeps falling into one obvious trap after another. Will she escape in time??? This could have the potential to become scary, except that it’s told in such a campy way. It’s easy to root for both our fellow human and for the dinosaurs, who after all, are only taking advantage of an exceptionally rude and potentially stupid person. Really, after all the damage Goldilocks did to those poor friendly bears, too. The endpapers all feature crossed-out suggestions for titles: Goldilocks and the Three Musketeers or Goldilocks and the Three Accountants, all so funny that my children made me read them all aloud and then went back and puzzled them out again. Preschoolers through younger elementary kids who are familiar with the original are the natural audience for this, as well as adults who appreciate a good snarky tale.

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Guinea Pig: Pet Shop Private Investigator: Hamster and Cheese

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Katy K.

Robin over at No Flying, No Tights turned me on this series – the fifth volume came out this year. But, as I hadn’t heard of it before, I took volume one home to share with my boy.

Guinea Pig, Pet Shop DetectiveGuinea PIG: Pet Shop Private Investigator. Volume 1: Hamster and Cheese. By Colleen AF Venable. Illustrated by Stephanie Yue.

This is a mystery graphic novel series for the elementary school set. Our setting is a pet shop. Young Hamisher the hamster who thinks he’s a koala is in a panic – Mr. Venezi, the pet store owner, has promised to banish all the “koalas” from the pet store if the sandwich he sets down in their cage every day doesn’t stop disappearing. (The store owner, it transpires, does not know his animals very well at all, and has mislabeled many of his animals, including finches labeled llamas and mice called walruses.) He turns to the sarcastic and world-weary guinea pig Sasspants for help, because the “g” has just fallen off of her sign and Hamisher believes that Sasspants is a PI – the pet shop’s own private investigator. Sasspants would really rather get back to her book, but as Hamisher refuses to leave her alone, she helps. Many of the pet shop animals are nocturnal, and the thefts happen during the day, so witnesses are scarce. The dauntless pair interviews a shifty snake (with a very suspicious square bulge in his body), some vain chinchillas, and a tank of goldfish with very short memories. The clues were there all along, but the answer wasn’t obvious even to me. The illustrations express the animals and their characters beautifully in a straightforward style, and the friendly and talkative Hamisher plays beautifully off of the cynical and reserved Sasspants, even in the short length of the story. The boy and I both enjoyed it. It’s animal fantasy of the type where the fantasy is that the animals can talk and think like humans, though there isn’t any magic. It’s somewhat above what he can read to himself, but most kids who are comfortable reading by themselves should do fine, and the characters are appealing to both boys and girls.

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Crown of Embers

Posted on November 6, 2012 by Katy K.

I read this depressing but accurate post yesterday morning at Teen Librarian Toolbox… This book, mentioned there, is one of the best recent teen series for gender-busting teen girls. She was dismayed at how few others have come out recently, so I’ve included a list at the end of my favorites… not necessarily romance-free, but certainly books where the women are strong and strong-minded, rather than beautiful, passive and tractable.

Crown of EmbersThe Crown of Embers. Fire and Thorn Trilogy Book 2. by Rae Carson.

In the first book, Queen Elisa successfully drove off the invading Invierno army, was able to use the power of the Godstone in her navel, fell in love and watched her love be killed in front of her, and made friends with her husband and watched him die slowly. Now she is the 17-year-old queen by marriage of an entire kingdom, one still reeling from the destruction of the war. She may be the queen who saved the kingdom, but few people are confident that she has the strength and wisdom to rule the country going forward. There are numerous attempts on her life in the first couple of chapters alone, and the council urges her to marry or pick a regent for herself to allay the fears of the people. One of these attacks occurs in the crypt where her husband is buried, despite the presence of a loyal guard outside the door. His execution in her name but without her knowledge before she’s even able to get out of bed opens her eyes to the fact that at least some of her council members are actively working against her. There are hordes of suitors showering her with lavish gifts, but she finds herself falling for Lord Hector, the captain of her guard. When Elisa learns that there is an Invierno working inside the palace, she, Lord Hector, and her guardian Ximena plan to leave the city until things cool down somewhat. Elisa forms an alliance with the sweet if ultimately unmarriageable Lord Tristan, as well as the outcast Invierno and underground leader Storm, whom she likes to deal with because his hatred of her is refreshingly open. Lord Tristan will be her cover and Storm her guide as she tries to find the narrow Gate of Life the scriptures talk about, which the Inviernos believe to be an actual location.

While the action is steady, there’s also a lot of personal growth as Elisa struggles with issues like how to use her Godstone, the appropriate use of power and role of a Queen, and how to balance the roles that she and Hector have always had to each other with the very different one that romance would require. She’s still overweight, and the world is such that she finds the blond hair and pale eyes of the Invierno Storm unsettling, which I find wonderfully refreshing. She’s a devout believer in her faith, with the tangible proof of God’s existence the living Godstone in her navel, but she learns more and more that she must use her mind more than its vague guidance. The only part that I found unbelievable (spoiler alert here) is that her captain of guard would be considered a remotely good match for her sister, the heir to a throne, if he isn’t considered good enough for Elisa and when he is most definitely needed to ensure her safety. The unlikelihood of this pulled me right out of the story to ponder it. As I couldn’t figure out much better what would have accomplished the author’s purposes, though, and I’m not her editor, we’ll have to leave it. I went on to enjoy the story, which wraps up the current storyline in some pleasantly surprising ways and opens up several more cans of worms in readiness for the final book.

Recent and favorite strong girl fantasy books for teens and older elementary:
Anything by Robin McKinley – The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown would be particularly appropriate.
The Enchanted Forest Chronicles by Patricia Wrede
The Wolves of Mercy Falls series by Maggie Stiefvater
Seraphina by Rachel Hartmann
Graceling and others by Kristin Cashore
Peaceweaver by Rebecca Barnhouse
Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier

I’m sure there’s more, but that feels like a good start. What are your favorites?

Edited to add: WordPress tells me this is my 701st post.

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Why I Vote

Posted on November 2, 2012 by Katy K.


It’s voting time again.

Colleen at Chasing Ray and others are asking litbloggers to say why they vote. You can take a look to see the posts that are already up.

I blogged about this in 2008, as well. Going to vote while in labor with my son and suffering from undiagnosed appendicitis was the most dramatic story I had, at least until I had a daughter needed a liver transplant before her first birthday. But that isn’t really a why.

I vote for noble reasons: because people have worked and suffered over centuries for the right to vote. I vote for the people around the world who still risk death to vote. I vote because even if democracy isn’t perfect, it’s the best thing we’ve hit on so far, and a democracy where people don’t vote, isn’t. I vote so that my kids can see me take an active role in our government and believe that one person can make a difference.

And I vote for more petty reasons: I vote for the right to complain to whoever wins afterwards, whether or not I voted for them, and because I don’t want my next-door-neighbors, with their odious signs and bumper stickers, to have the last word on the matter. I vote so that I can remind people at the library where I work to vote, just by wearing my “I voted” sticker.

I’ve gone through Vote411 and local papers, and put together my list. My son, who turns eight today, will be at school when I go to vote on Tuesday, but I’ll bring my daughter’s tricycle so she can zoom around the school gym that’s my polling station while I’m waiting in line and filling out the ballot.

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The Jewel of the Kalderash

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Katy K.

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Here is where I notice that my being bothered by language discrepancies is selective… Rutkoski also fails to use proper feminine endings on last names, but since her last names sounded more Latin than Czech to me to start with, it didn’t bother me.  Petra really should be Petra Kronosova if her father’s last name is Kronos. 

 

The Jewel of the Kalderash by Marie Rutkoski

Our three friends, Petra, Neel and Tomik are all sailing on a gypsy ship when we meet back up with them.  They are traveling to the secret Romany kingdom of Vatra, located off the coast of India, where Petra hopes to learn how to turn her father back from an evil killer Gray Man.  But when they get there, these concerns are quickly overtaken by Neel’s difficulties. It seems that the Romany have a rotating 4-year rulership, and Neel is the bastard son of the current, near-death queen.  Once king, Neel will have the power to help Petra and Tomik – but also be the very young ruler of four competing tribes, many of whom would like to see the crown just rotate to the next tribe.  There are several assassination attempts, and also a lot of upset that Neel’s closest friends are gadje.  While Petra is trying to learn how to control her magic, they receive news from Bohemia that the evil Prince Rodolfo’s brothers, the other potential heirs to the Empire, are mysteriously dying off.  Leaving Neel to fend for himself, Petra, Tomik and of course, Petra’s little spider Astrophil, journey to Austria to try to intercept Prince Rodolfo on his journey to pick up his crown.  In the midst of all this, neither Neel nor Tomik is content to be just friends with Petra anymore, and both are trying to be romantic and win her over.  There were just the barest hints of this in the earlier books, and, inveterate romantic that I am, I was surprised to find that I didn’t like the romance.  I enjoyed the purity of just being friends with multiple people of the opposite gender, without having to bring romance into it.  I was also not sure that I agreed with Petra’s choice at the big climactic moment, though of course I could tell that the story had been building to some kind of choice for a long time.  The ending was, therefore, a little disappointing to me on two levels.  Still, the intrigue and politics from three kingdoms, combined with lots of personal action, and vivid, growing characters was impossible to put down and should definitely be read by fans of the first two books. 

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The Iron Wyrm Affair

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Katy K.

Iron Wyrm AffairThe Iron Wyrm Affair. Bannon and Clare Book 1. by Lilith Saintcrow.
Adult New Books – Main Level – SCI FI SAINTCROW

The Iron Wyrm Affair drops us into the middle of a fight scene in a complex alternate-Victorian steampunk world. I think it was the complexity of this world that made the first couple of chapters feel slow to me, even though it started off with action and never slowed down. Emma Bannon is a top-level sorceress, a Prima, in service to Queen Victrix, current vessel of the ancient spirit Britannia. Emma is talented, beautiful, fashionable, and fiercely intelligent and has fought her way up from the gutter to be the only Prima among several male Primes. (Though she’s fashionable because she wants to be, her jewelry stores power for her and is always chosen carefully as an ensemble.) As our story begins, she’s searching for Archibald Clare, an unlicensed mentath. Here we must learn that a mentath is someone along the order of Sherlock Holmes, more intelligent than your standard-issue genius, who notices details without trying, processing them into patterns, and who will go crazy without enough information to process. Clare, having lost his license, is indeed on the verge of insanity, but Bannon is looking for him because he is the last mentath of any kind to be found in London, the rest having been recently murdered. Bannon’s out to protect Clare, but as long as he’s in her house, he might as well be useful – and all the murdered mentaths are the first pieces of a dark puzzle that leads to a threat against Queen Victrix herself. (Here I confess that I was did double takes the whole book, trying to keep straight that Bannon meant Emma and Clare, Archibald – I kept want Clare to be the woman. Oy.) Bannon is assisted by a single Shield, Mikal, a man with yellow eyes and a dark past, whom Bannon both can’t completely trust and can’t stop being attracted to (but not in a romance-novel, can’t focus on anything else kind of way, and we never see inside his head). As mentaths and sorcerers don’t really work well in close proximity, Bannon hires Ventinelli, an assassin whom Clare rightly immediately pegs as an aristocrat hiding as gutter scum, to act as Clare’s bodyguard. Bannon and Clare set off in opposite directions, she investigating the magical murder of another sorcerer as she was trying to interrogate him, and he to find out the reason there are suddenly no Prussian capacitors on the market, a line of investigation which leads to large clockwork war spiders. The combination of magic and Holmesian mystery is intriguing, the setting brought beautifully to life, the characters interesting. It’s not as funny as Gail Carriger’s Soulless, and deals much more with the dark and seamy side of politics, though with somewhat fewer serious underlying issues than The Iron Duke There are dragons and griffons here, rather than werewolves, vampires, or zombies. It still worked very well as a steampunk vision, and I’d look forward to reading more of Bannon and Clare’s adventures. It’s written for adults, and though the language is a little off-color, there’s nothing here in the way of sex or violence that action-loving teens would find exceptionable.

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Black Heart

Posted on October 27, 2012 by Katy K.

Black HeartBlack Heart by Holly Black. Read by Jesse Eisenberg. This is the final book in the Curse Workers series. Cassel Sharpe is still meeting with the Feds, who are trying to get him to sign up as a permanent part of their program. His mother is hopefully just in hiding, after her botched attempt in Red Glove to seduce the governor and get him to stop anti-curse worker legislation. The love of his life, mob boss heir Lila Zacharov, has officially joined the mob herself and still hates him. When the feds have Cassel doing surveillance training with his older brother, Baron, he uses the time to track Lila. Meanwhile, back at school, his two best friends Sam and have miserably broken up, and Mina Lang, random unacquainted student, comes to him for help saying she’s being blackmailed. While he knows that she’s definitely not telling him the whole truth, he can tell that she is in some kind of bad trouble. And since new Cassel is trying to be good, he agrees to help her anyway. Then, when the Feds come to him with a job using his transformation abilities in exchange for amnesty for his mother, he agrees despite his misgivings. Being Cassel, he can’t just trust them, and his digging shows that he’s right not to. In all of the situations – his fraught relationships with his family members and Lila, his poor attempts at normal relationships with his school friends, and the problems with Mina and the Feds – he’s dealing with trying to find a difficult balance between what will work and what he considers ethical. There’s no margin of error, and people will end up dead at the worst and emotionally devastated at best. It’s deliciously noir, Cassel’s brief moments of happiness countered with almost immediate downturns, and kept from being unbearable by Cassel’s sarcastic humor. There’s also a nice character arc for Cassel as he realizes just how gray the world is.

I was very interested reading this book to see how Black would handle the essential conflict between the dark noir storyline and the general need for a teen book to have a happy ending, and was satisfied with the conclusion. It was also interesting drawing parallels between Black Heart and the other dark teen books I was reading at the same time, Maggie Stiefvater’s Forever and Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games. On the subject of romantic relationships: Cassel talks to the reader about how he has seen relationships with one party or the other in control, but while he thinks that an equal relationship might be possible, he’s never seen one. For Sam and Grace in Forever, equality in relationship and counting on the strengths of the other is what it’s all about. The world around them is dark and the path to being together uncertain, but the relationship when they’re together is one anyone could aspire to. And while Collins plays up the love triangle in The Hunger Games and Katniss and Peeta have the potential for a very solid relationship, it’s pretty clear that Katniss is being thrust into this whole romantic relationship thing a couple of years before she’s really ready. On families of origin, by contrast, Cassel has it marginally better than anyone in Stiefvater’s books – at least he knows that his family will always do what they think is in his best interest, even if they’re wrong, while active neglect is the best that any of the Mercy Falls teens can hope for. Katniss, of course, while she’s connected to her family, is really the adult of the family for most of the series. Note on the subject of romance that there is one scene of actual sex in Black Heart, though it’s only explicit in the use of protection. And, as previously mentioned, immediately followed by terrible events. Also, random note, they will never be able to use smart phones in Cassel’s universe, because they couldn’t use the touch screens with their gloves on. I’m pretty sure those new touch-sensitive gloves you can get now here would send their curses through them as well. Jesse Eisenberg did a competent job with the narration. He sounded a little young to me, where I’d always thought of Cassel as pretty sophisticated, but maybe it is fine for his voice to reflect his actual age. While I’m sorry to see the last of Cassel, I highly recommend this series if you’re in the mood for dark, modern magic.

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