Top Ten Books I’ve Read So Far in 2014

Posted on June 11, 2014 by Katy K.

Top Ten TuesdayOnce again, those clever folks over at The Broke and Bookish have come up with another Top Ten Tuesday theme I couldn’t resist – this time it’s my Top Ten Books read this year. It’s really hard to limit myself to just ten when I’ve read so many great books recently, but here’s going with my gut, roughly in the order in which I read them.

And, holding over from this weekend’s 48 HBC mindset, I’m pleased to note that half of these have diverse protagonists. That’s better than I would have guessed, even if I’m not doing so well with diversity in my authors.

Stolen MagicStolen Magic by Stephanie Burgis
Eleanor & ParkEleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
Jinx's magicJinx’s Magic by Sage Blackwood
Coldest Girl in ColdtownThe Coldest Girl in Coldtown by Holly Black
The Castle Behind ThornsThe Castle Behind Thorns by Merrie Haskell
Black-Dog1Black Dog by Rachel Neumeier
cracksThe Cracks in the Kingdom by Jaclyn Moriarty
Velveteen vs. the MultiverseVelveteen vs. the Multiverse by Seanan McGuire
amazingthingThe Amazing Thing About the Way It Goes by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Bad Luck GirlBad Luck Girl by Sarah Zettel

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The Savage Fortress for 48HBC

Posted on June 9, 2014 by Katy K.

I finished this on Saturday as part of the 48 Hour Book Challenge. I’d read about it originally on Charlotte’s Library, and then saw it again on a list of What to Read Next: Percy Jackson from Fat Girl Reading shortly after I’d posted my own list of Rick Riordan Read Alikes. That reminded me that I really should read it!

The Savage FortressThe Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda. Arthur A. Levine, 2012.
This book has a really great tag line: “Heroes aren’t made. They’re reborn.”
The Savage Fortress tell the story of Ash Mistry and his little sister, Lucky, who are spending the summer visiting their uncle back in India. Their parents came from India, but they’ve grown up in London, and the heat and crowds of India are strange to them. Ash has grown up loving Indian mythology, though, so when his uncle is invited to help with some research around a civilization that vanished from India 4000 years before, he’s thrilled.

Then (very early on), he accidentally finds himself in the study of Lord Savage. There he finds lots of creepy things, including scrolls written on human skin, and overhears Lord Savage calling his servants (all of them wearing sunglasses at night) rakshasa – demon. Then, on a trip to the dig, Ash finds a buried statue of the legendary hero Rama, shooting an arrow with a gold tip. That tip falls off into Ash’s hand – and before he knows what’s going on, he and Lucky are being pursued through the streets of Varanasi by horrible demons. It’s soon clear that Lord Savage is trying to resurrect the horrible demon king Ravana whom Rama defeated thousands of years ago. Can Ash stop him before it’s too late???

This is a high action book with plenty of gore and exciting chase scenes. It’s a good introduction to Indian mythology which should be lots of fun for mythology fans. Ash does a little bit of reflection on his heritage – in London, he’s definitely considered Indian, but in India, he’s a “coconut”, brown on the outside, white on the inside. There’s a tiny bit of romance and some thought about that – but Ash is only 13, and it’s really just a tiny bit of romance. The villain is purely villainous, and our hero is never going to be anything else. 10-year-old Lucky, unfortunately, never gets to develop much beyond someone for Ash to save, but the Wise Old Guru’s demon assistant lady is much more active and very entertaining. But this is not trying to be a character-driven book. It’s all action and setting, quite fun if not my usual choice. It definitely belongs in the hands of Rick Riordan fans.

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48 Hour Book Challenge Finish Line

Posted on June 8, 2014 by Katy K.

Sunday morning

48 Hour Book ChallengeSo, yesterday, I read over my breaks and wrote reviews between library patrons. I listened in the car on the way home from work, took a break for supper and kid-wrangling, and read The Savage Fortress for 15 minutes next to the boy while he read Eddie Red: Undercover: Mystery on Museum Mile to himself. Then I washed dishes and listened to a half hour of Legend, finished The Savage Fortress, and started Nightingale’s Nest before turning in at 11.

This morning, I kept my alarm set for 6:30, hoping to squeeze in some more reading before my 8:20 cutoff time. Well… the girl crawled into our bed at 6, and having her awake made it a bit harder to read, though I won’t complain about the cuddles. I managed 45 minutes of reading by 8 am, which was enough to finish Nightingale’s Nest. I was hoping to get in another 15 of The Goblin Emperor, but the girl insisted on being read to herself. (I still enjoyed what I read of The Goblin Emperor over breakfast.)

That means time for the final totals. My total time for the event comes to 16.76 hours. My total writing time was definitely more than the rules allow, but my rounded-way down estimate of my blogging time total on my Excel came to 2.84 hours vs. 13.92 hours of reading time, which my love calculates is 3.6 minutes too much estimated blogging time. I think, since going back to my numbers is taking way too much time and it’s not going to put me over any records one way or the other, I’m just going to leave it, with apologies. It’s still over the 12 hours 11 minutes I read last year – hooray!

I finished five books this year, way over the two I finished last year, largely because only 2 and quarter of my hours this year were audiobooks. Here they are:
Bad Luck Girl
The Great Greene Heist
Tankborn
The Savage Fortress
Nightingale’s Nest

Now I need to get back to real life – I’ll try to check in on everyone else and finish reviews tomorrow. Happy continued reading to those still going!

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Tankborn

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Katy K.

This is the third book I read for this year’s 48 Hour Book Challenge. I heard about it from the Book Smugglers a while back and asked my library to buy it last December… so it’s about time I got around to reading it.

Tankborn Tankborn by Karen Sandler. Tu Books, 2011.
Kayla and Mishalla are best friends, but they know that when they turn 15, they’ll be Assigned to jobs anywhere in the country, with no way to communicate with each other again. They are both Tankborn, genetically engineered to meet specific needs in serving the Trueborn and Lowborn residents of Loka. Kayla, with engineered extra-strong arms, is assigned to care for an elderly trueborn man, while nurturing Mishalla is assigned to a crisis crèche, caring for a rapidly changing room full of babies and toddlers. They think they are just ordinary GENs, as the tankborn are called – but someone must think something else, because they both have secret data uploaded to their annex brains via the interface tattoos on their faces, along with being given physical datapods that will get the girls wiped if they are found. And both of them meet very good-looking, sweet boys who are way out of their league.

This was a really solid, entertaining book. Sandler did her work with a well-developed world that includes details of religion, dress, food, social customs and more. For most people, rank is easy to tell by skin color – the perfect shade of mahogany. Kayla’s skin color on the cover looks pretty accurate, and it’s unfashionably light, though too dark is also bad. Kayla’s romance was definitely on the insta-love side at the beginning, and I was worried, but they did go through and develop more of a real relationship. This is a thoughtful sci-fi/dystopian look at a caste system, with enough intrigue, action and romance to keep everything moving. I started not quite sure it would all work, and now I really want to go on to read Awakening, the next book in the trilogy. And I need to ask the teen librarian to buy Rebellion, which just came out this week.

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The Great Green Heist

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Katy K.

This is the book that got picked to be the poster child for the #WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign. The librarian at my son’s school and the local bookstore that runs the book fair there were kind enough to agree when I asked if we could take pre-orders there for this book, as part of that. I don’t usually buy books by authors I’ve never read before, but I thought that since I’d asked for it, I should put my name on the list, too.

greatgreeneThe Great Green Heist by Varian Johnson. Arthur A. Levine, 2014.
Jackson Greene is supposed to be reformed. His cons – however masterfully planned – have gotten him into a lot of trouble. The event from last year known as the Mid-Day PDA got him in so much hot water that the girl he likes won’t even talk to him anymore. So when the first people start asking for his help to make sure that very girl – Gabriela de la Cruz – wins the student council race, he says no. That’s until he finds out that she’s running against the mean and rich Keith Sinclair, who’s definitely pulling strings that shouldn’t be pulled to make sure that he wins no matter what. Once he gets in, he makes it clear that his plans are to make the school work for his friends and take funding away from any student groups that he’s not in himself. Only someone with Jackson’s skills will be able to steal the election back for Gaby, and he finds a very diverse group of students from around the school willing to help.

I’m glad that I was warned that there were a lot of people to try to keep track of. Usually, I expect the author to make the characters memorable for me without too much effort on my part, but since Jen at Jen Robinson’s Book Page said that this was tricky, I paid extra attention to the names at the beginning. Once into the story, it’s fast, furious, and very funny, with a group of very likeable characters. The villains are definitely one-dimensional, but that actually kind of adds to the fun in this kind of story. Jackson and Gabriella are both nicely developed – Jackson with his precise list of rules for cons and his seriousness about basketball; Gabriella with her devotion to the campaign and basketball. The kids felt older and cooler than I remember eighth grade being – but that might add to the appeal for middle school readers. It isn’t speculative fiction, but this is a very enjoyable book! I’m going to save it for my son to read in a couple years, as it’s just perfect for middle school.

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Bad Luck Girl for 48HBC

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Katy K.

Bad Luck GirlBad Luck Girl. American Fairy Trilogy Book 3 by Sarah Zettel. Random House, 2014.
At the end of the last book, Golden Girl, Callie defeated the Seelie King and freed her parents from his clutches. Everything should be just fine now, right? Well, not so much. For starters, Callie is still haunted by having been tricked into killing Ivy Bright, the Seelie King’s daughter. Then, it turns out that the Seelie King is not quite so defeated as all that, and has used her actions as an excuse to launch a war against the Unseelie Court. And while Callie loves her parents, it’s hard to have people telling her what to do when she’s been on her own for so long, hard to have her parents so absorbed in each other when she was used to having her mother to herself. Plus, her feelings for Jack have been growing more complicated, but with the random magical people she meets calling her Bad Luck Girl and all the people who’ve wound up dead from helping her, she’s really not sure she should be staying anywhere close to him. For the first time, too, she meets other people somewhat like herself – the Halfers, half fairy, half human, or half magic and half something else entirely. Her father shocks her with the strength of his prejudice against them, but Callie can’t just watch them be used as fuel for the war, forced to fight for whichever side gets to them first.

It’s all a lot to handle for a girl who’s just about to celebrate her fifteenth birthday. Callie manages with a combination of rising to the need and running off blindly into danger thinking dark thoughts about how her parents don’t trust her to do anything on her own, which actually felt about right. All four of them – Callie, her parents, and Jack – have fled as far as Chicago, where they take refuge in the slums with Jack’s none-to-friendly brothers. The chapters are all named for jazz tunes of the era, but whether it was because I don’t know jazz as well as the gospel tunes used in Golden Girl or because there’s not as much music in the story, the music didn’t feel as much an integral part of the story in this book as it did in the last one. The scene where Callie and her father work magic by playing piano together was really cool, though, and there’s a playlist at the back, so I could listen to the music if I were feeling motivated to track the songs down.

Especially since I read this partly for its diverse contents, I should note that I really like the way race is handled in this series, striking just the right balance between too much obvious attention being called to it without good reason and characters who aren’t affected by their background at all. In this book, traveling through highly segregated states, Callie’s parents (her black father and white mother) are in real danger of being separated or just thrown off the train. Jack, who’s mostly tried to avoid people knowing that he’s Jewish, has to face his heritage head-on as he comes back to the home he ran away from. Callie’s struggle in this book revolves more around what it means to be half human and half fairy than trying to pass as white, but all of these mixtures are a very important part of who she is. All in all, this was a satisfying end to one of my favorite recent series.

I will note once again, for the record, that Sarah Zettel was friends with my love in college, and indeed brought him into the group where I later met him (after she’d left). She still lives in town and we run into her at cafes every couple of years. While I’m very grateful to Sarah for indirectly introducing me to my love, I would not still be reading and buying her books if I didn’t really enjoy them on their own merits.

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48 Hour Book Challenge, Update 2

Posted on June 7, 2014 by Katy K.

Saturday morning, 10:30 AM
…wishing a belated good luck to everyone starting off on their reading challenge this morning!!!

So yesterday was my day off work, which I devoted to reading as much as possible. I’m showing that I spent a total of 10.26 hours on the Challenge yesterday, of which 9.42 were reading and .84 were blogging. (This is a little messy due to my trying to record the occasional 10-minute interval instead of sticking to 15-minute increments as Pam at MotherReader recommended.) I read half an hour of Jinx by Sage Blackwood to my son for his bedtime reading, finished Tankborn by Karen Sandler and got just a couple of chapters into The Savage Fortress by Sarwat Chadda. This morning, I read just a little more over breakfast (feeling wimpy for not setting my alarm early to have more reading time before work) and then had half an hour to listen in the car on my commute.

My plan for the rest of the day is to try to write the reviews of the books I read yesterday and catch up with what everyone else is reading between patrons, read over breaks, and hope to get the kids to bed early enough to read some more before I conk out myself.

Yesterday, Ms. Yingling was kind enough to compliment me on having done my homework for finding my big pile of books to read. Thanks, Ms. Yingling! I did spend the last several weeks making a list of potential books to read, putting holds on ones I knew I wanted so that they would be in on time, and checking out a couple of books at a time until I wound up with the giant stack (even if the stack is only half the books on my list). I decided to focus on speculative fiction, partly because it’s my favorite, partly because it’s even harder to find genre fiction with diversity, and partly because I realized that while diversity has been on my radar for a long time, I’m often likely to stick these diverse books on my mental list of cool books to maybe get to someday, and then actually read the books I hear about more often – which aren’t diverse. But all the titles (except one) were gathered from reading other bloggers’ reviews – so thank you especially to Charlotte and the Book Smugglers for helping me to find all of these books. Also, thank you to our page R., who steered me towards Marie Lu for an audiobook.

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48 HBC Update 1

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Katy K.

Friday, 2:45
It’s time to leave to get my kids from their various schools, so this has been my lovely chunk of reading time, interrupted only by checking to make sure that the dumpster my neighbor was having delivered into our shared driveway wasn’t going to block me into the garage. (I’m good.)

So far, I’ve finished Bad Luck Girl by Sarah Zettel and The Great Greene Heist by Varian Johnson. (I plan to write reviews tomorrow, but I enjoyed them both.) I’ve started on Tankborn, and will be listening to Legend by Marie Lu on the way to my son’s school. The two of us are listening to the third Spirit Animals book as well, which is also diverse, but which I think I can’t count as it’s over the one audiobook limit.

If you’re doing the 48HBC, how are you doing? And if not, it’s not too late to join – you can do any 48 hour stretch you want over this weekend! C’mon, you know you want to!

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Starting Line – 48 Hour Book Challenge

Posted on June 6, 2014 by Katy K.

Friday morning, 9 am
48 Hour Book ChallengeThis is my second year participating in the 48 Hour Book Challenge. I actually started reading at 8:20, with my audiobook in the car on the way back from my daughter’s preschool. That means that, unlike last year, I have a few precious hours at home alone to read, without worrying about her giving herself another haircut! And I took the additional step of doing the week’s laundry yesterday, so I won’t be listening to audiobooks while changing sheets this time around, either. I’m still working tomorrow, but I think my chances of finding a few uninterrupted minutes to read at a library are better than my chances at home.

I have an enormous stack of books to read, and my goal is just to get as many read as I can, and to see if I can get more reading time in than the 12 hours I did last year.

Here’s my overly ambitious reading pile, together with the hydrangea I got for Mother’s Day this year.
48hr2014

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Stack o’ Picture Books

Posted on June 4, 2014 by Katy K.

It’s another Kid Lit Blog Hop Wednesday! Take a look around at what everyone else has this time.

Kid Lit Blog Hop

Here (alphabetically by title) are the last couple of months’ worth of picture books, the ones that got asked for multiple times and pored over on their own.

byebyebutterfliesBye, Bye, Butterflies by Andrew Larsen. Illustrated by Jacqueline Hudon-Verrelli. Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 2012.
Charlie’s taking a walk with his father when they hear a chorus of “Bye, bye, butterflies!” coming from the top of the local school. Next year, Charlie starts school himself. His class, too, raises caterpillars into butterflies, finally taking them up to the roof to release them. There’s a nice circularity as Charlie sees a child from the roof who will start school the next year. The last pages give more concise information on the life cycle of a butterfly, where unlike in the main text, the chrysalis is called a chrysalis instead of cocoon. Calling it a cocoon in the main text bothered me, but it’s easy enough to correct when reading aloud, and the girl went to this one over and over again.

dragonquestDragon Quest by Allan Baillie. Illustrated by Wayne Harris. U.S. publication Candlewick Press, 2013. Originally published in Australia, 1996.
This was an older Australian book, recently released in the U.S. The second-person narration tells an exciting story of a child taken dragon hunting by an old dragon hunter. They are hunting the very last dragon, and the journey will be difficult. The gorgeously painted artwork shows a secret that the child understands but the old dragon hunter never does – delightful.

littleEvieLittle Evie in the Wild Wood by Jackie Morris. Illustrated by Catherine Hyde. Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, 2013.
Brief, poetic lines and painted pictures with visible brush strokes tell the story of a little girl in a red dress. Like Little Red Riding Hood, she’s walking through the forest with a basket of treats – Evie has a basket of enticing red tarts that prompted us to make two-bite strawberry pies. But where Little Red walks through the forest oblivious to both its danger and its beauty, Evie is very much aware of both. In the end, though, she’s taking her treats to Grandmother Wolf – who gives her a ride home when their picnic is finished. It’s a lovely, just-scary-enough story more in tune with today’s need to preserve nature.

marywrightlyMary Wrightly, So Politely by Shirin Yim Bridges. Illustrated by Maria Monescillo. Harcourt Children’s Books, 2013.
Mary is a very quiet, very polite little girl. Usually, she responds to being pushed around with apologies rather than protests, and her teacher has trouble getting her to share with the class. Mary’s moment of testing comes when she goes to the toy store with her mother to pick out a gift for her beloved baby brother’s birthday. The store is crowded and her mother is distracted and it looks like Mary might not end up with anything for her brother. Will she find what it takes to stand up for herself??? Even though speaking up is a problem that my own little girl has never, ever had, she really loved Mary and her adorable baby brother!

secretpizzaSecret Pizza Party by Adam Rubin. Illustrated by Daniel Salmieri. Dial Books, 2013.
This quirky, present-tense story is an ode to pizza. Raccoon loves pizza, too, but people never want to share. Can Raccoon find a way to get some pizza without being kicked out? Elaborate plans ensue.

twobunnyTwo Bunny Buddies by Kathryn Galbraith. Illustrated by Joe Cepeda. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.
Two buddies fight and go their separate ways before realizing that their friend is more important than being right. The brief rhyming text is illustrated with heavy linotype carvings filled in with eye-poppingly bright colors in a story that’s perfect for toddlers and up.

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