Top 10 Tuesday: Characters I’d Dress Up As

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Katy K.

Top Ten TuesdayI was firmly planning to stick with catching up on all the books I have to review today… until I saw this week’s Top 10 Tuesday theme pop up in my feed. (Thank you, Maureen!) I might not have mentioned this before, but I love dressing up, and dressing up as a book character is even more fun. Here, roughly in the order I met them, are some characters from youth and teen fantasy books I’d love to dress up as. Check out the page at the Broke and the Bookish for both literary costume ideas and creepy books for Halloween!

Pippi Longstocking from the books by Astrid Lindgren – because Pippi is an early strong girl character, and she has that instant recognition factor.

Eowyn from The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien – LOTR was sacred in my house growing up, and Eowyn was my favorite, because she actually did something. (you can tell the books were important because I had them read to me before I was old enough to read A Wrinkle in Time to myself….)

A Wrinkle in TimeMeg from A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle – I’ve talked enough about why I love this book, I think – but messy hair, a black eye, a plaid skirt, and my regular glasses would make a great Meg costume!

Menolly from the Harper Hall books by Anne McCaffrey – back when I was a lonely music- and book-loving teen, being a Harper on Pern seemed like a lovely career goal. I’m happily more content with my own life now, but it would still be wonderful to wear Harper blue for a night!

Aeryn from The Hero and the Crown by Robin McKinley – another favorite since forever. And fighting dragons is awesome!

LiraelLuna Lovegood from the Harry Potter series – because I love these books, and I already have the robe. I’d just need to needle-felt some radish earrings for myself…

Lirael of the Clayr from the Abhorsen books by Garth Nix – she’s a magical librarian! Plus her outfit is distinctive and described so clearly in the books that I’ve been wanting to make her outfit for, oh, a decade or so.

A Shadowhunter from the Infernal Devices book by Cassandra Clare. I’m going with the steampunky series, both because I liked it better and because I think Shadowhunter tattoos would look cool against my dark teal Victorian ball gown.

Screaming StaircaseBlue Sargent from The Raven Boys by Maggie Stiefvater – I confess, I’m not quite sure how to pull this one off beyond a visit to the thrift store – but that’s not stopping me from thinking about trying.

Lucy Carlyle from the Lockwood & Co. books by Jonathan Stroud – dark top, leggings, skirt, heavy boots, rapier, silver chain, and assorted small bags to turn me into an agent fit to fight Visitors from beyond the grave sounds both easy and appropriate for Halloween. I think I’m going to convince my son, who wants a costume that will include his rapier, to go as Tony Lockwood himself. (Check out some fan art here: http://www.deviantart.com/art/Ghost-Hunting-471565845)

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The Glass Sentence

Posted on October 28, 2014 by Katy K.

The Glass SentenceThe Glass Sentence by S.E. Grove. Viking, 2014
In 1799, the world came apart and then back together quite differently. Since the Great Disruption, times as well as countries are different. Mapmakers who can figure out where things are and what kind of culture exists there are highly in demand. 12-year-old Sophia Tims, whose parents left to go exploring years ago and never returns, lives in Boston with her Uncle Shadrack, the most famous mapmaker in all of New Occident. He’s just begun to teach her about some of the more esoteric forms of mapmaking, maps that can hold memories of weather, places, and people. But as Boston politics cause havoc even there, Sophia comes home one day to find that her uncle has been kidnapped and their secret map room ransacked. She and Theo, a boy from the land to the south, try to follow Shadrack’s instructions to take his most precious glass map to safety in the Baldlands, Theo’s native lands. They are closely followed by the truly creepy bad guys – the Sandmen – and even when they get to the Baldlands, all is not as they hope.

This is a long fantasy book heavy on the world-building. I was captivated by the ideas about juxtaposed times and trying to navigate between different eras. The characters were straightforward – I found Sophia sympathetic enough, loved the pirate queen Calixta, and kept getting annoyed at Theo for being unreliable and then getting upset at Sophia for not trusting him. They just met – why should she trust him? If you’re not the type to get bored by lots of world-building (I wasn’t, but many other people have been), there is a lot of exciting action in interesting places between these scenes. I just ended up with the feeling that the characters were running around for no good reason. Sure, they’re trying to save the world, but neither the peril nor the solution quite made sense to me. This is nominated for the Cybils in the middle grade speculative fiction category, but shelved in teen at my library. There’s no romance and a low body count, but some disturbing torture scenes. This is a great book for people who love maps and detailed fantasy worlds with intriguing ideas behind them, though not one I’d hand to just anyone who came to the library looking for a fantasy book.

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The Magic Thief

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Katy K.

This is a series that hadn’t really been on my radar until last year, when I Winterling, also by Prineas. This spring, Charlotte wrote a Waiting on Wednesday post about how, while she liked Fer and Rook just fine, she was really anxiously waiting to find out what would happen to Conn. I thought that if Charlotte – and lots of other people – liked the Magic Thief better than the Winterling books that I had considered quite solid, I’d best get on reading them.

Here’s a series that got slowly pushed to the top of my list by the sheer amount of fellow blogger love for it. I tried to speed through the first three books (as much as it’s possible to speed through audiobooks) so that I could read the fourth one in sequence, as it’s nominated for the Cybils and I’d have to read it anyway. I’ll do the best I can to talk about these books without too many spoilers.

Magic ThiefThe Magic Thief. Book 1. by Sarah Prineas. Narrated by Greg Steinbrunner. Recorded Books, 2008
Connwaer is a pickpocket and lockpick living on the foggy, cobbled streets of Wellmet. One cold evening he picks a wizard’s pocket, and ends up not with coins, but with the wizard’s locus magicalicus, the stone tuned just to him that lets him do magic. Just touching this would kill most people – but as Conn doesn’t die, the wizard, Nevery Flinglas, decides to keep him around. Conn is determined to be Nevery’s apprentice, but the Council of Wizards will only accept him if he can find his own locus magicalicus. The magic in Wellmet is fading, and that means Nevery is too busy to help Conn – even though Conn thinks he has an idea what’s happening. But will anyone believe a former gutter boy? Continue reading →

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Sinner

Posted on October 22, 2014 by Katy K.

Today is release day for Blue Lily, Lily Blue. I haven’t read it yet. I know, I could have gotten my hands on a review copy, but I am in love with the audio editions of these books, so I have to wait. On the plus side, I haven’t found any of my Cybils books for download from the library, which means I can listen to this guilt-free while doing my chores at home. So instead of the new-new Maggie Stiefvater, I offer you a review of Sinner, which came out this summer.

SinnerSinner by Maggie Stiefvater. Read by Dan Bittner and Emma Galvin. Scholastic Audio, 2014.
Isabel Culpepper’s once-perfect life has fallen apart, and leaving Mercy Falls didn’t fix things. Her brother is still dead, her parents are separated (not that she wants her father around), she has no friends in Los Angeles. She gets through life by working on not giving a damn about everything, and showing it to the world. She’s no longer in love with Cole St. Clair – life is safer that way, and he’s not around anyway.

And then he comes, making his way to Los Angeles by signing a deal to produce an album on a reality show. The reality show is run by one Baby North, who’s made a reputation for herself by filming stars crashing and burning. He’s determined not to get sucked back into drugs, not to crash on TV – but the wolf is still in his blood, calling him, and Isabel Culpepper is less than thrilled to see her one-time maybe boyfriend show up with a camera crew.

So there are werewolves, and lots and lots of angst. It works, though, because the angst is legitimate. Cole isn’t a safe person, and while both he and Isabel and we the reader know it, we also know that he’s trying, and that he and Isabel both help each other be better people. It’s dark rock-and-roll romance, sexy and dangerous (without being explicit.) There’s also lots going on with the side characters and Isabel and Cole’s work, so that the romance is just part of the characters’ total development, as it should be. Both of the readers sound just right – Bittner with his rough but young-sounding voice and Galvin reading like the ice queen Isabel is. I was seduced by the characters all over again.

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Ninja Librarians and the Hero’s Guide to Being an Outlaw

Posted on October 20, 2014 by Katy K.

The Accidental KeyhandThe Accidental Keyhand. Ninja Librarians Book 1. by Jen Swann Downey. Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, 2014.
Dorrie and Marcus, two stage sword-fighting siblings from Passaic, New Jersey, are chasing their friend’s pet mongoose through the local public library when they find themselves sucked through dimensions to Petrarch’s library. This turns out to be a magical library with doors to many different “wherens” (where and whens), through which trained Lybrarians travel to preserve threatened books and authors. This life sounds like a dream come true to action-and book-loving Dorrie, and teenaged Marcus has fallen in love with a beautiful apprentice and also wants to stay. But they are treated with suspicion because they arrived in highly unorthodox fashion through the roof rather than a door, and there are other things that make it look like they are connected with the enemies of the Library.

I loved the concept of the secret society working to prevent censorship, and Petrarch’s Library is filled with interesting historical characters (indexed in the back), including Hypatia and Cyrano de Bergerac. Dorrie is a character that reminds me pretty strongly of my own tween self. And yet somehow despite having so many elements that I love, this didn’t quite gel into a book that I loved. I found my mind wandering off in the middle and wasn’t entirely satisfied by the ending. The concept is cool enough, though, that I might try the second book to see if it pulls together a little more.

herooutlawHero’s Guide to Being an Outlaw by Christopher Healy. Walden Pond Press, 2014
This is the third book in the series – I read The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom when it first came out, skipped The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle and then read this one because it’s nominated for the Cybils in my category. In this entry, our friends in the League of Princes have been outlawed in all the kingdoms for the murder of Briar Rose, following Prince Liam and Princess Briar Rose’s divorce. The League will have to clear their own names by finding out the real murders, all while avoiding the bounty hunters on their trail and various other bad guys. Often separated from each other, the women form their own group – the Furious Female Fighters, or ffff for short. It’s more fast action with plenty of slapstick humor as our heroes work against bards and other villains to save all the kingdoms again.

Once again, there are a lot of elements to the story that I liked. It is laugh-out-loud funny, with the humor in action, dialogue and pictures. The combination of action and humor is one that keeps kids, especially boys, riveted. I love fairy tale retellings, and it’s fun to see the characters from different fairy tales interacting like this. This one even has pirates! It’s less fractured than the first book, since we know the characters already and they’re not off having adventures one at a time. In this book, too, the women are every bit as competent as the men, though they don’t all excel at fighting. I really appreciated not having the girls relegated to the sidelines just because it’s a book for boys. But it felt like with so many characters, all deliberately caricatured, they never felt real enough for me to believe in any of them. I’m also frustrated by the length of the books – 516 pages is an intimidating length for average to reluctant readers, even though the books otherwise have lots of appeal for kids like that. Still, if you’re lucky enough to be looking for books for an eager reader who isn’t as concerned with well-rounded characters as I am, this is a fine choice.

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The True Meaning of Smekday

Posted on October 19, 2014 by Katy K.

Halfway through reading this book aloud to my son (423 pages, thank you very much), I read on Melissa of Book Nut listed this book as one of her favorite audiobooks… d’oh! We now own it on audio, and my love reports that he’s enjoying it very much. I’d initially brought this book home to read for myself because the Old School Wednesdays review on the Book Smugglers reminded me that I’d wanted to read it for a while, and with the movie coming out next year, I thought I should read it before it got hold lists on it. I should note that it also won the Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy Cybils award when it was first published.

truemeaningofsmekdayThe True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex. Hyperion Books, 2007
The story is framed as a school report. Gratuity Tucci – Tip to her friends – is supposed to write an essay on what Smekday means to her. It starts out really short, with her memories of the day the alien Boov first invaded. But as her teacher repeatedly tells her she can do better, her essays get longer and longer, including both her sketches and drawn photographs of the events. Tip watches her mother get sucked up into the Smek ship and sets out in her mother’s car with their crotchety cat to find her – eventually accompanied by one of the invading Boov himself. J. Lo, as he’s decided his English name should be, has gotten in trouble with the rest of the Boov. She consents because J. Lo transforms the car so it can fly, which is necessary since most of the roads have been bombed out. Along the way, they visit the magical Happy Mouse Kingdom and Roswell. Tip is still working on ways to get rid of the Boov when another batch of alien invaders turns up, aliens who make the Boov look sweet and kind for leaving Americans a single state to live in.

There is so much wonderful going on in this book – where to start? There’s Tip herself, a human girl of mixed African and European ancestry, very self-aware and unwilling to let anyone’s ideas about what these things should mean about her get in the way of what doing what she feels needs to be done. There’s J.Lo, who starts out annoying and grows on the reader much as he does on J.Lo. The adventure is absorbing, the details both of the invasion and Boov history and culture well done, and all the while this is going on, we the readers and Tip are uncomfortably aware that the alien invasion and treatment of humans isn’t really much different than any number of things that humans have done to each other. If that starts to sound like it might be too heavy, it’s not, because it’s handled so well and with so much humor that we were laughing out loud every time we read the book together.

Hilarious writing, good action, with real characters and Deep Thoughts. This is what a great children’s book should be. Well done, Adam Rex, and the 2007 Cybils Award committee.

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Guest Post from Cheryl Mahoney: Retelling “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces”

Posted on October 17, 2014 by Katy K.

A couple of years ago, my friend Dr. M. and I started reading every retelling of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” that we could get our hands on.  It turns out we weren’t the only ones finding this interesting – my blogging friend Cheryl from Tales of the Marvelous has just published her own retelling, The Storyteller and her Sisters. I’m looking forward to reading it as I very much enjoyed her last book, The Wanderers. (Here’s my interview with her about The Wanderers.) She’s here today to talk about her favorite retellings – including a short story I haven’t read myself!

I’ve always loved fairy tales, in part because they usually don’t make a bit of sense! It makes them so ripe for retellings: stories that can pick apart those pieces that didn’t add up, and spin a new story around them. My latest book, The Storyteller and Her Sisters, is based on a fairly obscure Brothers Grimm story, “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces (or The Twelve Dancing Princesses).” Though most people don’t seem to be familiar with the story, there are quite a few retellings—but I think I have a unique angle on it!

Cheryl MahoneyWhen Katy offered me an opportunity to do a guest post, I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite retellings of what has become one of my favorite fairy tales.

The basic story is about twelve princesses who are wearing out their dancing slippers every night, even though they’re locked in their bedroom. Their father the king puts out a call for champions to solve the mystery. We eventually learn that the princesses are secretly leaving their chamber, passing through a magic forest of silver, gold and diamonds, and crossing a lake to a castle where they dance with twelve princes. And from that premise, many variations have arisen!

Wildwood Dancing by Juliet Marillier was one of my first retellings, although a very loose one. It’s about five sisters (not princesses) who go dancing at a fairy court that’s not as terrible as in most versions. This is one of my favorites, because it gives us a wonderful heroine in Jena. All five of the girls are fully realized characters, and they’re certainly not waiting around helplessly for a champion to rescue them. It also helps that this features one of my favorite love stories.

Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George is a much closer retelling. It does better than most at developing the relationship between the final champion and the oldest princess–and I rather love that the hero is brave and strong and also knows how to knit (soldiers have to get socks from somewhere!) It also has some of the best-depicted princesses. Even though there are twelve of them, George makes it easier than in most retellings to keep them apart. She puts the most attention on just a few, and when others appear, it’s usually clear in the moment who they are. For example, Poppy is the boisterous one, and it was no effort to remember that because she’s always being boisterous whenever we see her.

The Twelve Dancing Princesses by Marianna Meyer and illustrated by Kinuko Y. Craft is a very beautiful picture book. It’s a pretty accurate retelling without doing anything too excitingly different—but the illustrations are exquisite. Especially some of the pictures of the princesses in their gowns, and the magical settings.

Troll’s Eye View is a collection of short stories, including “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces” by Ellen Kushner. Mostly pretty light and silly, this captured better than any other version how annoying it could actually be to have eleven younger sisters! The princesses are universally devoted to each other in other versions, and it was fun to see an oldest princess who finds her clamoring crowd of sisters overwhelming.

These are my favorite retellings, though I’ve read five others as well. One trend I’ve noticed is that, almost universally, the princesses’ father is well-meaning (or at worst, aloof or unaware) and the princes the girls dance with have ill-intent. But when I read the original Brothers Grimm, I’m not convinced that’s really how the story goes…so my unique angle took rather a different direction. I recommend all of the books above—and of course I recommend mine too!

Cheryl Mahoney is a book blogger at Tales of the Marvelous, and the author of two books based on fairy tales. The Wanderers, published in 2013, follows the journeys of a wandering adventurer, a talking cat and a witch’s daughter. Her new novel, The Storyteller and Her Sisters, retells “The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces,” with twelve trapped princesses who decided to take control of their story.

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Greenglass House

Posted on October 13, 2014 by Katy K.

Not long after I finished reading the Kate Milford books the Book Smugglers sent me, her latest book came into the library!

Greenglass HouseGreenglass House by Kate Milford. Clarion Books, 2014
Milo has grown up in an old mansion in the smuggling town of Nagspeake that has long since been converted to a small hotel used mostly by smugglers. He’s an introverted type who takes comfort in his routines, so it’s very disturbing to him when their normally peaceful and empty Christmas break is interrupted by the sudden arrival of a whole lot of guests. Curiously, all of the guests seem to be inventing other business, but mostly interested in the house itself. There are so many guests that Milo’s parents call the cook back from her vacation. Meddy, the cook’s daughter, befriends Milo and introduces him to the concept of role-playing games. While they don’t start an official campaign, they make up characters for themselves – Negret and Sirin, blackjack and scholiast – specifically to investigate the mysteries behind the guests and the rash of stolen objects that crop up.

The role-playing with its sets of published books, 30 years or so old in the story when I know they first started being published like that in the 1980s, was the thing that set this story most firmly in about the present time for me, though it wouldn’t for those less geeky. Otherwise, it’s quite nebulous in that there are cars, telephones and electricity, but none of the other technological devices that change so quickly that they could date the story, a nice touch. But the role-playing is very important to the story. Milo himself has Chinese ancestry, though he was born locally and adopted by his parents. Though he loves them, he wonders about his birth parents. As he answers questions about the character Negret for Meddy and himself, he grows more comfortable with his relationship with his adopted father and what he might have inherited from his birth parents. Pretending to be a character who is confident around people winds up, perhaps predictably but very satisfyingly, making him more self-confident in general. It’s worth noting, too, that Milford manages to give Milo two living parents who love him and check in on him to make sure he’s all right, but still give him enough space to go having his adventures with Meddy.

The house is a delightful part of the story – large and complicated, with an attic filled with old and exciting treasures and stained-glass windows with secrets built into them. There is mystery and adventure with an underlying thread of magic and great characters, plus a twist that maybe I should have seen coming, but didn’t. Everything comes together just right, making this one of my favorite books this year.

[11/28/14 Updated to add] Other, perhaps more eloquent takes on Greenglass House:
Elizabeth Bird’s review at Fuse 8 Productions, with great thoughts on breaking the rules of children’s literature.

Joint review from Ana and Thea at the Book Smugglers, with important thoughts on adoption

Maureen at By Singing Light, who seems to have enjoyed it as much as I did.

Cindy at Fantasy Book Critic, who didn’t like it so well.

Sherry at SemiColon Blog, with thoughts on its timeless feeling.

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Two for Grown-Ups

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Katy K.

Here’s a last couple of adult books before things shift over to a steady diet of middle grade speculative fiction.

The Book of LifeThe Book of Life. All Souls Trilogy Book 3 by Deborah Harkness. Viking, 2014
This is the last book in the trilogy that began with A Discovery of Witches. I won’t attempt to explain the plot, seeing as how it’s somewhat complicated and builds a lot on the previous two books. This one is framed around the zodiac entries from Diana’s Elizabethan commonplace book. I have really enjoyed these books so much for their combination of fantasy, plot and characters. It’s about the ages-old conflict between vampires, witches and demons, but also about our main characters’ personal growth, and Diana and Matthew’s struggle to learn how to navigate their marriage, parenthood and careers. And how often do history professors get to be the stars of the book? Harkness, a scholar herself, has a deep respect for scholars and librarians that I very much appreciate. This a fine conclusion to a series highly recommended for people who like their fantasy with depth.

LandlineLandline by Rainbow Rowell. St. Martin’s Press, 2014
I read Landline because I’d enjoyed both Fangirl and Eleanor and Park so much. Georgie McCool is a TV comedy writer. She and her partner have been working off of work time for years on episodes for their very own show – and now it looks like someone is interested in buying it. The hitch is that putting the proposal together as requested means skipping her husband Neal’s family Christmas in Iowa, missing the holiday with her husband and young children. She stays behind, but tries to call – only her husband won’t answer his cell. When she plugs in an old corded phone in her childhood bedroom, she makes contact with a Neal from years before, right before he proposed to her.

There were parts of me that had no sympathy for Georgie – what kind of parent skips out on Christmas with their kids, especially when it obviously means so much to the partner as well? And part of me had trouble with Neal, too, who wasn’t willing to verbalize his objections and didn’t answer his phone when Georgie called. And then, looking at past and present, I did understand Georgie at least (not Neal, but we see so much less of Neal), and this rings so very true to the difficulty of marriage, the way you can be both completely familiar and strangers at the same time, wanting to know everything and still keeping secrets. It all happens in the context of Georgie’s quirky family – her mother, married to the former pool guy Georgie’s age, and Georgie’s much younger sister, who orders pizza every day because she’s too shy to ask the delivery person out. So, yeah: funny, a tiny bit irritating, and some thoughts on relationships that resonated pretty deeply with me.

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The Fourteenth Goldfish

Posted on October 8, 2014 by Katy K.

It’s Stephanie Burgis’ Hot Chocolate Day! Which means you should all take a break and drink some hot chocolate to celebrate the release of the Kat, Incorrigible boxed set! (This is on my wishlist… I will have to buy it for myself if nobody else does, but my birthday is coming up!) In honor of Hot Chocolate Day, here’s a recipe for Spanish Hot Chocolate with Churros, as I was bowled away by the delicious thick hot chocolate when I was in Spain myself.

I read this book because Netgalley thought I should, and I thought they might be right – we’ve very much enjoyed the Babymouse and Squish graphic novels Holm writes with her brother.
The Fourteenth GoldfishThe Fourteenth Goldfish by Jennifer L. Holm. Random House, 2014.
Ellie comes home from school one day to find a teenage boy at her house. He looks like a teenager, but he’s dressed like her grandfather. It turns out that he is her grandfather, who’s done an experiment to reverse his own aging. Now Ellie’s mother makes him go to school with Ellie, while he’s trying to break back into his own lab so he can publish his groundbreaking research.

Even though the premise of this book is pure science fiction, what it brings out is a lot of relationship issues. Ellie has just lost her best friend due to shifting interests, and has to work to build new ones. Ellie’s mother and grandfather have always been in conflict over her theater work versus his scientific approach, and living together again brings this to a head. Ellie herself learns to appreciate her grandfather in a new way.

I keep wanting to say that the characters are “learning” such and such, and they are, but it’s the kind of learning that feels genuine and truly heartwarming, and there’s plenty of silliness mixed in as well. Even as Ellie’s mother and grandfather find science and art at odds, Holm pulls pieces from both to blend into a meaningful look at life. It’s also really nice to see Ellie getting more interested in doing science and learning about scientists herself. This is a really delightful book that feels like it will appeal most to fans of contemporary realistic fiction.

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