I first read this book over a decade ago, years before I started this blog. It’s been on my shelf ever since then, a gift from charles_midair and elaine_alina. I loved it then, and was just listened to it on an old iPod borrowed from fritz_et_al (it also seems to be one of the popular choices for fantasy collections on Overdrive, the largest library ebook platform). I was rather astonished at how vague my memories of the story were, the story just as good if not better the second time around.
The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. Read by Lloyd James. Lord Cazaril was once a castle-warder and a military captain. Now he is homeless and broken from brutal treatment on a Roknarri slave ship. He’s walked across Chalion on foot to get to the Provincara of the country estate where he was a page in his youth. He’s hoping for a place in the kitchens; instead, he is assigned to tutor the Royina Iselle, sister to the heir of Chalion, and her companion Betriz. Iselle is full of sixteen years of innocent passion and belief in justice, of the type that causes her to publicly expose a judge for suspected fraud. After a few months of trying to teach the girls diplomacy and caution along with the languages and geography of the surrounding countries, Iselle and her brother Tadez are both summoned to court. The king, their older half brother, is weak and ill and wants them to become familiar with courtly living. Unfortunately, returning to court for Cazaril also means facing the very men that Cazaril knows deliberately sentenced him to the galleys, now the king’s trusted advisers and the most powerful men in Chalion. Cazaril’s loyalty is tested to the utmost, as he becomes literally bound up with the curse that he learns is on all of the royal family of Chalion. He asks for the help of the Gods, and the Gods make it clear that they wish to work their will through him – if only he can figure out what their will is in time to save Iselle and Tadez. It was impossible not to hope for Cazaril not only that he would find his way through his dilemmas, but also that he could find a way to hope for a future for himself beyond his duty.
Despite being a book filled with bad things happening to good people, the story isn’t depressing. There’s love and beauty and plenty of humor. Politics are part of the driving force of the plot, but there are only a handful of major players to consider, so it doesn’t get confusing. The book is filled with interesting characters, including Royina Ista, Iselle and Tadez’s mother, and the Roknarri divine of the Bastard (see below) who works, oddly, as the head groom in Roya Orico’s private menagerie. Actually, the gods are major players as well, allowing the plot some literal Deus Ex Machina moments. I suppose I can think of a handful of other fantasy novels where religion and theology play such a major role, but I really enjoy Chalion’s unique religion, somewhat similar to and yet different from earthly paganism. Chalion and a few of the neighboring countries are Quintarian. The five gods are the Mother, the Father, the Son and Daughter (each assigned to a season of the year, sexes, and stages of life), and the Bastard, who watches over bastards, people of non-mainstream sexuality and events out of season. The Daughter of spring, Iselle’s patron, and the Bastard are the most featured in this book. Several other neighboring countries are Quadrenes, who do not hold the Bastard to be a god. Naturally, both sides hold the other to be heretics, and it echoes into politics as people who are natural followers of the Bastard flee from Quadrene countries to Quintarian. Though I’m condensing it here, the theology comes up naturally through the story as it is lived. Really the whole world is set up just as well, without long expository sections. This is top-notch fantasy, with something for everyone. Lloyd James has just the right voice to pull off the battle-weary Lord Cazaril, if the voices of the two girls sound just a little young for young women who are definitely taking charge of their own destinies. My love and I both separately listened to and very much enjoyed this.
P.S. What does this cover depict? Can anyone figure out if it is related to anything that happens in the story? It looks to me like a generic fantasy painting put on the book without any regard to the actual content. The cover shown for the ebook version was even worse, featuring, of all things, a large dragon.
Bigger than a Breadbox by Laurel Snyder. Our heroine Rebecca is about 14, I think, when her parents’ marriage starts really falling apart. Her father, an unemployed taxi driver and former teacher, has been absorbed in apathy, spending his time on the couch. Her mother, a hospital nurse, loses it in the middle of the week. She packs Rebecca and her little brother Lew, aged two, into the car and drives them from Baltimore to Atlanta to Gran’s house. She tells Rebecca that it’s just a temporary measure until she and Rebecca’s father get things sorted out, but she’s found a job and enrolled Rebecca in school. Rebecca, quite naturally, loves both her parents and would really like them to get back together again. She’s deeply betrayed both by the split and by her mother’s deciding to start a new life for all of them without so much as telling anyone ahead of time. She misses Baltimore and its seagulls as much as she misses her father and her best friend. While not speaking to her mother, she makes her way up to her grandmother’s attic, and it’s there that she finds, among a collection of old breadboxes, one that grants wishes. It takes a little bit to figure this out, of course, and to figure out the rules: she must wish for a tangible object that will fit in the breadbox. First it gives her an old Agatha Christie novel when she wishes for a book, which turns out to be perfect for taking her mind off the situation. But when she starts school and super-popular Hannah is assigned to show her around, it is perfect for giving her the cash and small gifts that will help her become the popular girl she never was at her old school. What Rebecca doesn’t realize at first is that even magic isn’t free. It takes her a while to realize the full truth about the breadbox magic, and even longer to figure out how to make things right again. 
The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman. Illustrated by John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess and Paul Johnson. This is an old Neil Gaiman, originally a 1993 miniseries, just brought back into print as a single graphic novel. Hooray for back in print Neil Gaiman! Twelve-year-old Timothy Hunter has magic potential, and a team of four mysterious (but probably familiar to DC fans) men in trenchcoats are watching him skateboard and deciding if they should offer him the chance to have a tour of the magic world. The men include John Contantine, Dr. Occult, and Mr. E. After Timothy’s yo-yo is turned into an owl, Timothy agrees to the demonstration/tour, following which he is to be offered a chance to start proper magical training or not. Each of the four mysterious men takes him to a different realm – past, present, Fairy and future. In each realm, he meets with famous people, some universally famous, like Merlin in the past and Baba Yaga and the Fairy Queen in Fairy, but also lots and lots of magic-using DC characters. I don’t read very many of the ongoing series type graphic novels, so most of these characters were familiar to me only from my work selecting graphic novels for my library, but while knowing them might have added to the story, I didn’t feel that I was missing anything not knowing them. (I’ve read only one short Zatanna comic book, but have seen lots of her on covers, and was quite tickled here to see that Timothy reacts with horror to the sight of her in her costume, when she changes out of her everyday clothes. Like most female superhero costumes, it’s ridiculously revealing and impractical.) In every realm, Timothy is in danger, both from the dangers inherent in traveling someplace one doesn’t really belong while wanting to get back to where one does belong, but also because Evil knows that Timothy is out there, and would like to either recruit or eliminate him. Timothy will witness things along the way that you probably wouldn’t want your twelve-year-old seeing – more along the lines of death than sexuality, probably fine for older teens and less sensitive younger ones, but still put in our adult rather than teen collection. This is a basic magical journey story, something that in the hands of a lesser person might be stereotypical. However, it’s Gaiman. It works beautifully, despite having a very limited amount of space to tell the story. All of the artists are top-notch as well, a different one for each of the original four comic books. It’s beautiful to look at just as art even while it’s art with a job to do: telling the story, maintaining continuity and the ability to recognize the characters from one volume to the next, at the same time as showcasing the artists’ distinctive styles. Any Gaiman fan will of course want to read this, as will those who enjoy a good fantasy yarn. 
Giants Beware! by Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre. Graphic novels aren’t my favorites for reading aloud, but I was so excited about this one that I read it aloud to my son. (I read about it on 
The Scottish Prisoner by Diana Gabaldon. It must have been my very first year as a librarian, nearly ten years ago now, when a patron I was talking to put her hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye, and said, “You have got to read the Outlander series. They are the best books in the world.” Well, I’m too fond of having lots of books to call any one series the best in the world, but for once, I took her advice and started the series. The books are addictive, long and involved, such a tight blend of historical fiction, time travel, and romance that the publishers originally decided to market them as romance mostly because romance had the biggest audience, though at the library, we shelve them in SciFi/Fantasy. Gabaldon now has a spin-off series and has done a graphic novel featuring the story from the first book from the point of view of the other main character. I haven’t kept up with all of these – I have a hard time justifying reading everything in a series as a librarian – but considering the volume of the output, I think that missing just one of the main series (which came out the same time my daughter was born) and one of the spin-offs is doing pretty well. Given all that, I was shocked to realize that I couldn’t find that I’ve ever reviewed a Gabaldon book here. However, there is again no way to review (or read) this book without massive spoilers for the first couple of those books. 
Laundry Day by Maurie J. Manning.
The Microscope by Maxine Kumin. Illustrated by Arnold Lobel. I read this book to my son’s class in April, for Poetry Month. I like a funny poem for kids, especially, and this one is funny enough that I memorized for a high school poetry assignment, too. That time, I found it in a Cricket magazine, and though I have about half a bookcase devoted to my lifetime collection of Crickets, I couldn’t find the poem when I went looking for it a couple years ago. This year, I tried Google again, with better results. Now I have the perspective for the name Maxine Kumin to sound familiar. Right – former poet laureate and Pulitzer prize winner for poetry. Not only was the poem published as a picture book in 1984, but my library had it on the shelf, shelved with the biographies. It’s a tiny little thing, maybe 5 by 6 inches, so Teacher A. was kind enough to set up the document projector for me so the class could see the pictures. I’m not sure if this is irony or appropriate for the topic. In any case, we had fun. 
Storybound by Marissa Burt. Here is a book that called out to me from the shelf with its beautiful cover. It looked to have many things going for it – a lonely girl sucked into a strange magical world, a world where people study to become characters in books. Yay lonely girls, magic and metafiction! It was fun, but somehow not quite as perfect for me as I was hoping, in ways that I’m still trying to put my finger on. 
The Gift of Dyslexia by Ronald D. Davis with Eldon M. Braun. This is the dyslexia theory that my son’s school espouses, and at least per Amazon.com, seems to be among the top three dyslexia books currently out. Davis’s theories are based on his own experiences as a dyslexic, and the results from helping dyslexics in the clinics he founded. That’s a lot of experience, but as there are no scientifically based studies behind it, it’s more like a very large body of subjective evidence than truly scientific. Anyway, Davis’s theory is that dyslexics are visual learners. They think in pictures, and are used to being able to rotate, explode and reassemble objects in their minds without knowing they’re doing it. This is great for art and engineering, but really unhelpful for reading, where the letters need to stay two-dimensional and in the right order. The more words in a text that don’t make pictures, the more the brain tries to use its unhelpful skills to solve the problem, and the worse it gets. Davis has a test to see if this is the case with the person in question, and then a couple of methods (based primarily on age) for teaching them to be conscious about controlling their mind’s eye and its focus. Once they can do this, the program calls for hands-on work with making letters out of clay and working intensively with the toughest words to read – those that don’t easily translate to pictures. This, Davis says, will effectively cure dyslexia, while still preserving the gifts that caused it in the first place. I’m not sure how much of this really applies to my son, though some of it clearly does. I don’t know whether the school is using their treatment method or just subscribes to the theory that dyslexia stems from a gift rather than a disability. This book does some things very well, though. It has good descriptions of typical symptoms, good and bad, that go along with dyslexia. It is relatively short, printed in larger type with a minimum of hyphenated words to make it easier for dyslexics to read. 
Brain Gym by Paul E. Dennison and Gail E. Dennison This book was recommended to us by a friend, who had great success with both of her children using the exercises in it. I had to have it sent via ILL, and was rather surprised when I got it. It’s a small paperback only 48 pages long with amateurish drawings. The theory behind it is both simple and not much talked about: problems with reading, math, concentration, etc., can be helped by physical exercises, particularly ones that require crossing the body’s midline. For what we were looking at, drawing sideways figure eights in the air, first with just one hand and then with both held together. I think the theory is that problems like these can be caused by lack of communication between the two hemispheres of the brain, and doing physical integration can prime the pump, as it were, making the academic exercises easier. If you or someone you’re helping has difficulty, you can just flip to the appropriate page, where the exercise is drawn out with text descriptions of how to do it and what it should accomplish. I’m not sure we’ve remembered to do this quite as often as we ought, but it has seemed helpful when we do. In order to up the interest quotient, my brilliant husband had the idea of having our son do the exercises holding a foam sword, rather than just tracing the pattern in the air with his hands. It worked. For those more interested in the theory (which, come to think of it, would probably be me), there’s also a teacher’s guide, which has more detailed notes on everything.
alibrarymama 