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The Ordinary Princess for Flashback Fridays

Posted on October 16, 2015 by Katy K.

Flashback Friday is a feature I’m borrowing from Stephanie at Views from the Tesseract, whose post on this very book inspired me to read it to my daughter. (She included more of the fantastic illustrations, too!)

The Ordinary Princess written and illustrated by M.M. Kaye. Doubleday, 1980.
This is a book that I loved as a child, without paying any attention to the name M.M. Kaye, who is probably better known for her serious adult works such as The Far Pavilions. (I still haven’t read any of her adult works however.) This summer I thought my daughter might be old enough for it, so we read it together at bedtime over the course of a couple of months.

Amethyst Alexandra Augusta Araminta Adelaide Aurelia Anne of Phantasmorania is the seventh princess in her family, born even more golden-haired, blue-eyed and sweet-tempered than her six older jewel-named sisters. But at her christening, the fair Crustacea arrives (dripping with seaweeds) and gives her the gift of being ordinary. Amethyst becomes so very ordinary that everyone calls her just Amy. And as she’s much too ordinary to be set on a pedestal as her other sisters are, she spends her time exploring in the woods without worrying about the freckles.

The only hitch is that she’s too ordinary-looking to attract the usual sort of husband material. When her father and his councilors hatch a dreadful plan involving hiring a dragon to Lay Waste the Countryside, Amy decides to take matters into her own hands, which eventually involves her running low on resources and taking a job as a scullery maid at the castle in a neighboring kingdom. There she meets a young man, Peregrine, who calls himself a “man of all work” and even more wrinkles develop…

This is a sweet and subversive fairy tale – though as it was first published 30 years ago and the author started writing it twenty years before that, it feels much less subversive that it would have 50 years ago. Amy, with her “mousy brown” hair instead of blonde, is the most diverse character in the book, and there’s equally no whiff either of romance beyond straight or of the possibility of a happy single life. None of those keep me from loving this book to pieces, however, and the messages that are here are still important: that who you are on the inside is more important than what you look like, and that working too hard on the outside can make it harder to pay attention to the inside and to the world outside of yourself. Amy knows that she enjoys herself and her life much more for giving up on worrying about her appearance. She has to work for her living, and work hard. And the romance that develops isn’t about social position or physical attraction, but a slow blossoming of friendship into something deeper. All of this is packed, with humor and affection, into a chapter book of 112 pages, including the author’s beautiful illustrations.

It turned out to be a little too much for my little girl to keep track of just as she was falling asleep at night – but I found it even more delightful than I remembered it being. We’ll try it again when she’s older – I’d say it would be good for independent readers of 8 and up, and younger for reading aloud. Have you read this? What did you think?

Posted in books | Tagged Flashback Fridays, youth fantasy | 1 Comment

The Chosen Prince

Posted on October 15, 2015 by Katy K.

Diane Stanley’s The Silver Bowl was the first book I ever nominated for a Cybils award, back in 2011. And on that subject – today is the last day to nominate books for the Cybils, and if you were looking for a book to nominate in the Elementary/Middle Grade Speculative Fiction category, this one is eligible and has not yet been nominated.

The Chosen Prince by Diane Stanley. HarperCollins Children’s, 2015.
The publisher’s description of this says it’s “based loosely on the Tempest”, but the dealings with the Greek gods here are a bigger draw, at least for the kids I know. The kingdom of Arcoferra was long ago found guilty of crimes against Zeus, who punished it by splitting it into the kingdoms of Arcos and Ferra, doomed to eternal war against each other. With so many resources going towards the war, both countries face drought, famine, and the debilitating summer sickness. All the people believe, though, that Athene in her mercy will one day send a champion who will end the war.

Prince Alexos, at his first visit to the temple of Athene, is determined to be the Chosen One. His father raises him harshly, determined to make him into the perfect prince. Alexos’s only comfort is he sweet baby brother, Teo. But when Alexos himself comes down with the summer sickness, everything he cares about is gone. Two things keep him going – the wise palace doctor, Suliman, who encourages him not to give up on life, and his visions of a magical island where the fruit trees bend down to give their fruit and the beautiful girl who lives there with her father.

This has enough introspection to keep me and other character-oriented readers happy, with thoughts on survivor’s guilt and what it means to be a good person and a ruler. But with races, deadly illness, battles, shipwrecks, and political intrigue, there is also plenty to appeal to the action-oriented. While I was able to predict some of the plot, other parts were pleasantly twisty and surprising. This is a great choice for fantasy fans young and old, and especially great for kids turned on to Greek mythology by the Percy Jackson books.

On that note, here’s a list I put together of Rick Riordan read alikes.

Posted in books | Tagged ancient Greece, historical fantasy, youth fantasy | 2 Comments

Guest Post: Otis Frampton with Oddly Normal Blog Tour with Giveaway

Posted on October 14, 2015 by Katy K.

[Edited 10/30/15 to add]

I am updating this to include it in Mother Daughter Books Giveaway Linky Party, and extending the giveaway deadline to 11/3/15. Please leave a comment to enter the giveaway! And head on over the Mother Daughter Books for more great giveaways.

oddlynormalcover Today I’m welcoming author/artist Otis Frampton to my blog to talk about his comic book, Oddly Normal.

Bio:

Otis Frampton is a comic book writer/artist and animator. He is the creator of Oddly Normal, published by Image Comics. He is one of the two artists on the popular animated web series How It Should Have Ended. He is also the creator of ABCDEFGeek, a geek-alphabet cartoon series that can bee seen at otisframpton.com, the How It Should Have Ended YouTube channel and on TeeFury.
If you ask 10 different comic book creators “what is your process for creating a comic book page?” you’ll likely get back 10 different answers. Sometimes you’ll get back 11 or 12 answers, depending on the mental stability of the creator in question.

But the bottom line is this: there is no “right” way to make comics. We all work a little differently to get our stories on the page, using our experience and artistic tastes to guide us. Some of us work entirely digitally, never touching paper in the creative process. Some of us have never used a computer even once to make a comic and never would. And some creators mix it up, using any tool that will help them get the job done.

I’m pretty much in the all digital camp. Sometimes I draw on paper and scan the drawings into the computer to color, but it’s not very often that I touch pen to paper. when it comes to how I like to work, 95% of the time I’m a pixel pusher. And I likes it that way.

So here’s my process for creating comics. It’s not the “right” way to do it (like I said, there isn’t one), it’s just my way. If you’re someone who has an interest in making comics, I hope that you learn few things from reading about my process. And if you don’t, that’s okay. I’m sure you’ll find your own way to do things and I’m certain that it will be awesome. Whatever gets the story on the page, right? Right.

Okay, here’s how I do it…

This is a page from issue #10 of my comic book series “Oddly Normal” (published by Image Comics):

OddlyNormal-Process-1[1]

And here’s how this page started out:

Like I said, I work digitally. Everything I do is hand drawn or painted, but it is done using a stylus and a Wacom Cintiq drawing tablet. I do all of my drawing and coloring in Photoshop CS5. It’s an older version of Photoshop, but it gets the job done.

When I’m laying out (or roughing out) comic pages, the drawings are pretty ugly. It’s just a big mess. But the purpose at this point is to get the ideas down on the page and get a sense of the visual information needed and the panel layouts that will be necessary to tell the story. Scribbles get the job done at this stage, so I scribble.

This page in the story is showing Oddly getting ready for a day at school while trying to deal with her new pet, Oopie. I originally thought that there would only be four panels on this page. But as you can see from the next image, I decided to add a fifth panel to the top of the page, to clarify that Oddly was on her way to getting ready for the day.

Now I start to refine the drawings, working on getting the basic poses and expressions for the characters drawn. It’s still rough, but it’s getting there. It’s all about clarifying character and action at this point. Some artists will work in silhouette for a page like this, so that a character’s body is conveying a sense of intent and purpose even in all black. It’s a great technique for action scenes, but I chose not to employ it here.

I make one more pass at what I call my “digital pencils” before moving on to drawing the final black lines for the page. Some artists play it loose with the penciling, but I like to get it all down before I commit to black lines.

One thing I do that most comic book creators don’t do is that I place all of my lettering (the test, balloons and captions) during the layout and pencilling stage. I do this so that I know that the flow of words and images will work as I intend it to before I commit to the final drawings. Most comic book lettering is placed onto a page after all of the artwork is finished. I think this is a backwards way of doing things. Comic books are a medium of words and pictures and they should work together. The lettering on a comic book page is the element that readers spend the most time looking at (initially, at least). So it shouldn’t be an afterthought. It should be as important as the images. One of my biggest pet peeves is seeing poorly placed lettering on a comic book page that covers up important visual information or creates a badly composed panel by way of awkward placement. I get around this by doing my own lettering for my comics. It’s a skill well worth learning if you want to write and draw your own comics.

The nest step is to ink the page, creating finished black lines for the artwork.

Again, the inking is done digitally, using a special custom-made Photoshop brush that gives me the kind of line weight I like. I usually draw the character lines and the background lines on separate layers in Photoshop so that when I move on to the coloring phase I can have more leeway in how I work on them.

Next up is my least favorite part of coloring anything in Photoshop: flatting.

Flatting is basically filling in the flat areas of color on everything in each panel. It’s boring. It’s mind-numbing. I hate it. So I pay someone else to do it for me. Most comic colorists have flatters who work for them and they’re angels sent from above to make life easier for us. God bless the flatters.

Now comes the fun part, my favorite part of working on a comic book page: bringing everything to life with color.

I start by doing a few lighting passes on the characters and background. Choose a light source, add shading and then refine. My work is very “cartoony”, so there’s not a lot of fancy rendering done. I try to keep things simple. Oddly Normal’s world is a cartoon fantasy land, and the artwork reflects that.

Next up, I add some subtler shading to the page.

This is also when I would add in effects, like the water and the streaks on the mirror. There isn’t too much that requires fancy effects work on this page, but I usually save that for after the basic shading is done so that I have a base to work from and know where my light sources are coming from.

We’re almost done now. Just a few tweaks to make.

At this point, the page is basically finished being colored. But it’s not finished having its color enhanced. Once I have all of the base coloring done, I add color overlays and adjustment layers using Photoshops color tools to “plus up” the colors. I add some glows and lighting here and there and try to make the colors pop a bit more. Sometimes I’ll add a very strong color overlay to an entire scene to give an environment a specific feel. Blue for night, warmer colors for daytime. It’s important to me that readers can easily and quickly orient themselves in a new environment while reading the story so that they always have a sense of where and when they are. Color can be an important storytelling tool in that way.

And that’s it! The last thing I do is make the lettering layers visible once again and the page is complete!

I hope you enjoyed reading about my process for creating a page of “Oddly Normal!” You can find the series in any book or comic shop and watch for “Oddly Normal” Book 2, which collects issues 6-10 to hit stores in the next few weeks.

Thanks!

-Otis Frampton

Here’s the complete blog tour, so you can visit them all:

Monday, October 12: Guest post, Log Cabin Library
http://logcabinlibrary.blogspot.com/

Tuesday, October 13: Interview and review, Kdub’s Geekspot
https://kdubsgeekspot.wordpress.com/

Wednesday, October 14: Guest post and giveaway, A Library Mama
http://alibrarymama.com

Thursday, October 15: Interview, review, and giveaway, The Book Monsters
http://thebookmonsters.com/

Friday, October 16: Interview, Outright Geekery
http://www.outrightgeekery.com/

Saturday, October 17: Review and giveaway, Charlotte’s Library
http://charlotteslibrary.blogspot.com/

I have one copy available to give away within the US and Canada only! Leave a comment below with your favorite fictional witches by October 31st, 2015, to enter the giveaway.

Posted in books | Tagged giveaways, youth fantasy, youth graphic novels | 9 Comments

Kidlitcon or Bust!

Posted on October 9, 2015 by Katy K.

Just a quick post – I’m off to Kidlitcon for the first time tomorrow morning! (It will also be my first time flying off without my children – wish us luck.) I am super excited to meet my blogging friends in person for the first time. I’ll be rooming with Charlotte of Charlotte’s Library – I can’t even remember how long we’ve been “imaginary” friends. Watch for me to come back inspired, with even more fun books to read!

And in the meantime, please hop on over to the Cybils website and nominate some books! I really think every good, eligible book should be nominated, and there are still lots that haven’t been.

Posted in Conference Notes, Personal | Tagged Cybils | 2 Comments

The Princess and the Pony

Posted on October 7, 2015 by Katy K.

Cybils nominations are still open! And there are lots of good books, and books that look good, that haven’t yet been nominated! Our fearless leader, Charlotte, has put together several lists of unnominated books in the Elementary/Middle Grade Speculative category if you are in need of nominating inspiration…

I’m always game for stories of unconventional princesses. This is one my kids and I enjoyed.

The Princess and the Pony by Kate Beaton. Arthur Levine Books (Scholastic), 2015.
Princess Pinecone is born to a family of warriors in a culture of warriors. Her mother looks like Xena and her father is a Viking dude with hipser glasses – but her they just won’t see Pinecone as a warrior. What she wants more than anything else for her birthday is a real warhorse. What she gets is a a pile of adorable sweaters and a chubby, cute little pony which farts too much. Still, when the big warrior field day come up, Pinecone is determined to participate, chubby pony and all. The battlefield is crowded with warriors of many eras and ethnicities, fighting each other with “dodgeballs and spitballs and hairballs and squareballs (those were new).” And what Princess Pinecone learns is that brawn and speed are not the only way to win a battle – she has a secret weapon she never even knew about.

I said I love stories about unconventional princesses (and girls in general.) Pinecone wants to be a warrior, and while she wears a dress, it’s short and blue and lacking in frills. Her blond hair is a realistic length, practically rather than decoratively braided, and she is lacking the ubiquitous extra-long eyelashes. But for all that, she is undeniably cute, and she does not win the day by being better at manly things than the men, like Violetta in Cornelia Funke’s Princess Knight (though I love that book, too.) The art is digital, but looks like ink and gouache or watercolor, very much in the cartoon style that Beaton is famous for. The lines are energetic even though most of the characters are cutely rounded. The language is delightful, too, with lines full of alliteration and vocabulary like this: “Pinecone was flabbergasted, flummoxed, floored!” All of this works together to make a story that’s both fun and funny, with a nice twist on the “be true to yourself” message.

Posted in books | Tagged picture books | Leave a comment

Deep Secret

Posted on October 1, 2015 by Katy K.

Cybils nominations open today!!! Go read the rules and nominate a favorite book! I’d be particularly happy if you nominate a middle grade speculative fiction book for me to read!

But moving on to what I’ve already read… I have read and loved quite a few books by Diana Wynne Jones, but happily for me she was prolific enough that there are still many I haven’t read. This one I won in a giveaway run by Brandy at Random Musings of a Bibliophile, the difficult choice of which of many wonderful-sounding books I hadn’t yet read decided by going for the one that wasn’t readily available from the public library. Bonus: this is the version with the beautiful, newly redesigned cover.

Deep Secret by Diana Wynne Jones. HarperCollins UK, 2013. Originally published by Victor Gollancz, 1997.
Rupert Venables is the youngest Magid from Earth, working to resolve magical problems around the universe from a non-magic-friendly planet. As the story opens, he’s called to witness a trial in the very unfriendly Koryfos Empire, one which ends in a way that leaves him shaken and wanting nothing more to do with Koryfos. His life gets more complicated when his mentor Stan dies, leaving Stan’s ghost to help Rupert track down the next Magid. He has a list of potential candidates, each of them seeming more odious than the last. And as the hunt heats up, the Koryforian Empire falls apart, leaving them begging Rupert for help putting things back together again.

The most unlikely of the candidates is Maree Mallory – a mutual loathing develops between Rupert and Maree the first time they meet. Maree knows she’s adopted, but is still a loving caretaker to her somewhat younger cousin Nick, in the face of his neglectful parents, hateful mother Janine in her ugly fancy sweaters and a preoccupied author father. Maree has come off a bad break-up and temporarily dropped out of university to avoid seeing the ex, deliberately neglecting herself to make herself more odious to Nick’s mother Janine.

Rupert, much more concerned about appearance, is horrified by Maree and desperate to find a better candidate. (To be fair, he has a lot more reasonable grounds for frustration with Maree than her looks.) His solution is to bring everyone together at a favorable place – which winds up being the Hotel Babylon, at the same time as a large sci-fi/fantasy con. Somehow, though Rupert doesn’t understand how, his somewhat absent-minded next-door neighbor ends up coming along as well.

In classic Jones style, all the plots come crashing together, sparks crashing and dust flying, and when everything has settles, all the disparate plots have come together and fit just perfectly. Deep secrets are hidden in nursery rhymes; and Maree turns out, to the delight of both Rupert and the reader, to be a really fantastic character, making a place for herself despite odds that turn out to be even more formidable than they first appear. There is also the complex world-building that I expect from DWJ, which I’m not going to get into here, but which I was happy to find easier to comprehend that the set-up in some of her other books. In short, this was highly enjoyable. I passed it right on to my mother, and would likely be looking for the next book in the duology were it not for the pile of potential Cybils reading now crowding my shelf. Thank you so much for giving this to me, Brandy!

Posted in books | Tagged teen fantasy | 3 Comments

Long Black Curl

Posted on September 30, 2015 by Katy K.

This is the third Tufa book after The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing. Thanks to Tor for sending this to me! (It is lucky for me I work at a library as well, or I could never afford my book addiction.) This series is on my list of musical fantasies (which I also need to update.)

Long Black Curl by Alex Bledsoe. Tor, 2015.
As usual with these books, we start with a new set focus characters from the last books. The story opens in a small plane, full of rockabilly music stars, which crashes in the mountains near where the Tufa live in the 1950s. Byron Harley, the “Hillbilly Hercules” is the only survivor, and his efforts to find help lead him to a small campfire where a couple of men sit drinking moonshine and trading songs.

In the present day, exiled Bo-Kate Wisby returns to Needsville determined to get rid of Rockhouse (the leader of the dark Tufa) and unite the Tufa under her leadership. But as her story is told from her Black British assistant Nigel’s perspective, we don’t know from the beginning exactly what she and her former lover Jefferson Powell were exiled for, nor what she did to break the magic that should have kept her from ever finding Needsville and its music ever again. Meanwhile, twelve-year-old Mandalay Harris, head of the light Tufa, has to figure out how to stop her without losing track of her own values. We’ve seen Mandalay from other character’s points of view before, but this is the first time we’ve seen her from inside, the child with the memories of an entire people. It’s tricky to balance childhood with all of that, and Mandalay is dealing with her first crush on top stopping a civil war.

These is dark fantasy, with plenty of blood and vengeance – the darkness both tempered and enhanced by the music that plays throughout. This book in particular looks at what separates and connects the two branches of the Tufa, as three separate couples with partners (or potential partners) on opposite sides struggle with finding ways to bridge that gap. The optimist in me would have preferred happier endings for several of the characters, but overall, this is a compelling story with believable characters and a solid look at how far love can go.

Posted in books | Tagged adult fantasy, contemporary fantasy, musical fantasy | Leave a comment

State of the Book Basket – September

Posted on September 27, 2015 by Katy K.

The month is almost over – next week, the Cybils nominations will open. I’m already checking out books that might be nominated, but next week, the reading starts in earnest! Here’s a look at what’s on our bookshelves and in the library book basket:

The daughter has just started first grade and turned six (in that order). She still doesn’t see herself as a reader, though loud phrases from Happy Pig Day by Mo Willems can be heard coming from behind closed doors. Okay, Andy by Maxwell Eaton (a Cybils easy reader finalist last year) is also popular, along with picture books Happy in our Skin by Fran Manushkin and The Sky is Falling by Mark Teague. We’re listening to the Little House series by Laura Ingalls Wilder in the car, with frequent pauses to discuss things, and are currently on Farmer Boy. We’ve been reading The Mouse Mansion by Karina Schaapman, enjoying the detailed photographs of the mouse-sized dollhouse with characters, though last night we read The Princess Knight by Cornelia Funke, which she’d gotten for her birthday from a friend. She also got an early chapter book picked because the heroine has her name, and a collection of National Geographic readers about bugs. We got her Completely Clementine by Sara Pennypacker, though she hasn’t wanted to start it yet.

The son is now in fifth grade. We’re still reading The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley aloud together. In the car, we recently finished The Wells Bequest by Polly Shulman, and are re-listening to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone while waiting for the library to have a copy of The Grimm Legacy for us to listen to – luckily for us starting with book two, it didn’t feel like we started in the middle of the series. He just finished listening to Inkspell by Cornelia Funke on his iPod. And – such a huge milestone – he’s finally gotten to a reading level where he can enjoy reading Percy Jackson to himself in print!!! He’s starting with The Lightning Thief, of course – from the paperback we got him a couple of years ago, as we knew he loved it on audio and wouldn’t be able to read through a library copy in time. He also wants to read the graphic novel Roller Girl by Victoria Jamieson before it’s due back at the library.

I have no idea what my love is reading right now, other than scouring through our cookbook collection in search of tiramisu recipes. He has Going Postal by Terry Pratchett out from the library, though.

I myself have the usual pile of things waiting in a number of different formats. In print, I’m reading Rump by Liesl Schurtliff (somewhat guiltily, as it’s been on my want to read list since it came out a couple of years ago and is thus can’t count for Cybils reading this year. Maybe her new book will be, and this could be background reading?) But Mars Evacuees by Sophia McDougall is up next at home, and that definitely is eligible for the Cybils, as well as being one I’ve been wanting to read for a while now. I also have the new teen fantasy by Kate Elliott, Court of Fives. At work, I’m reading The Winter Prince by Elizabeth Wein, the first in her early Arthurian series, as I wanted more after reading Black Dove, White Raven but have, as of yet, been too chicken to read Code Name Verity, as excellent as everyone says it is. I just finished The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place by Julie Berry in the car, and have moved on to The Poe Estate by Polly Shulman, as my boy has no interest in spooky books but I wanted to continue the series. I’ve got Circus Mirandus by Cassie Beasley up next – I’m very curious about it as my blogging peeps have either loved or hated it, with not a lot of in-between opinions. On my e-reader, I’m working on both Heroes of the Earth by Martin Berman-Gorvine and The Wrinkled Crown by Anne Nesbet (due out for reals in November.)

What are you reading these days?

Posted in books | Tagged book basket | 2 Comments

Nimona and Lumberjanes

Posted on September 25, 2015 by Katy K.

Is there a universe where I could read everything I want to that sounds good? Can I live there, please? It took me longer than I wished to get to these (and many other titles) because there’s so much else out there that’s so much fun! Both of these graphics have been getting a lot of much-deserved attention, and I finally read them!

Nimona by Noelle Stevenson. HarperTeen, 2015.
Nimona is a young shapeshifter. As the story opens, she knocks on villain Ballister Blackheart’s door saying, “Hi, Boss! The Agency sent me! I’m your new sidekick.” The Agency, of course, had nothing to do with it, but Nimona is insistent on staying, even when Blackheart turns out not to be as evil as she likes. He’s really not interested in killing his nemesis/best friend Sir Goldenloin. Nimona, though, pushes him to ever bigger deeds of evil, all bent on taking down the Agency – which, as it turns out, has evil plans even bigger than those of the official villains.

Continue reading →

Posted in books | Tagged teen fantasy, teen graphic novels, youth fantasy, youth graphic novels | 4 Comments

Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures

Posted on September 24, 2015 by Katy K.

This book was Maggie Stiefvater – a favorite author – writing middle grade fantasy. How could I resist?

Pip Bartlett’s Guide to Magical Creatures by Jackson Pearce and Maggie Stiefvater. Scholastic, 2015.
Pip Barlett’s world is a lot like ours, except that magical creatures are real. People raise unicorns for show, and have smaller, cuddlier magical creatures for pets, not always advisably. No one but Pip, though, can talk to them, and everyone else believes that she’s playing pretend when she says she has. After a nasty incident involving a herd of unicorns at a school event, Pip is sent away to live with her aunt who runs a veterinary clinic for magical creatures in a different town. Pip is thrilled to help out in the clinic, even as she’s sad about leaving home and uncomfortable with her snotty older cousin Callie, who wants nothing to do with the magical creatures. She is forced to be more extraverted than she would like and make friends with shy Tomas from down the street, who becomes a worthy friend despite being allergic to nearly everything. Pip works on annotating her guidebook to magical creatures, writing in where the official word falls short of what one would actually need to deal with the creature. These pages are included in the book: drawings of the creatures with extra-large, cute eyes and Pip’s notes in handwriting next to the typed captions – it is all both funny and adorable.

The action heats up literally as the town is suddenly crowded with Fuzzles, cute and fuzzy creatures that breed very rapidly and catch on fire when scared or excited. Where did they come from, and why are there suddenly so many of them? And an enemy arrives, in the form of Mrs. Dreadbatch, an inspector determined to shut down the much-needed clinic. Pip and Tomas both have to use the abilities that no one else believes in to solve the problems before it’s too late.

This is fun and light, perfect for kids just starting into full-length chapter books. It wasn’t quite so interesting to me as an adult as I’d wanted, even if I couldn’t really put my finger on anything wrong or missing. I’d still happily give it to younger kids, though, especially as more books in the projected series come out. This would be a natural fit for fans of Suzanne Selfors’ Imaginary Veterinary series.

Posted in books | Tagged youth fantasy | 1 Comment