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Though His Majesty’s Dragon and the following book both have historical settings, going from one to the other was a rather jarring transition. Kinda like jumping off the dragon and landing in the Australian desert.

Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living by Carrie Tiffany This is a novel of Depression-era Australia. Our narrator, Jean, works on the Better Living Train, traveling among the remote settlements of Australia giving lectures on sewing techniques. Her colleagues teach farming, animal husbandry, cooking and baby care. Soon Jean marries Robert and leaves her friends on the better living train for life on a farm, where Robert tries to prove that SuperPhosphate and following his own published Rules for Scientific Living can make farming in the Mallee a success. The plot sounds spare, and it is. The first-person present-tense narrative makes the book feel like one of those liquid movies shot with a blue or sepia filter, like The Piano. Setting and language take center stage as Tiffany explores the limits of love and of progress. This is Tiffany’s first novel, short-listed for the Commonwealth Literary Prize, and got starred reviews in lots of review journals.

My experience as a teen librarian will be branching out soon. No, I’m still an adult librarian, but I’ll be leading the teen book club while the teen librarian is at ALA. Lucky me, getting to read a book by a favorite author. This book makes me want to find DeLint’s other Newford books – I don’t think I’ve read any of them.

The Blue Girl by Charles DeLint Imogene ran with a gang and got in cauldrons of boiling hot water at her old school. Now that she’s moved to Newford, she wants to start over. She picks Maxine, sitting alone at lunch, as a likely friend candidate and tries unsuccessfully to avoid the attention of the bullies. The book starts out kind of slowly as a teen friendship novel, and is going along on that level when things slowly start getting creepier. The resident school ghost develops a crush on Imogene and starts following her around everywhere. Every night, Imogene’s abandoned imaginary friend, somehow not as friendly-looking as she remembered him, shows up in her dreams and warns her not to open the door. As things accelerate down the hill, it looks like the bullies are the least of Imogene’s worries. I may have said it before, but no one can weave the truly creepy supernatural into ordinary urban life like DeLint. And Imogene and Maxine are characters well worth rooting for.

I also read It’s the Thought That Counts by Lynn Johnston, the For Better or for Worse 15-year collection. Yep, one of my favorite comics, from a cartoonist with brains, guts and heart. And a sense of humor, of course.