First Sunday Daughter Reviews: March 2016

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Happy (almost) Spring! I’d say it feels like it here, but we never really had much of a winter. It is nice to see flowers coming up though. (On the downside: allergies are back in swing. Yippee!)

We started watching the Shadowhunters TV show, and A got into it so much, she plowed through these:

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She has all the feels.

I brought home an advance copy of this for K

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She LOVED it. Seriously. Thought it was wild and fun.

M and E are reading Antigone in class. They’re familiar with the story already, and are loving the reactions of the class as they go through the story. We do love our Greeks around here.

What are you reading this month?

Driving Heat

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drivingheatby Richard Castle
First sentence: “The last thing Nikki Heat expected when she received her promotion to captain of the NYPD was how much the proud expression on Rook’s face in the audience would make her want him.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Heat Wave, Naked Heat, Heat Rises, Frozen Heat, Deadly Heat, Raging Heat  (Yes, I really have read the whole series.)
Content : Loads of f-bombs (though less than other books, I think), plus some tasteful sexytimes. It’s in the adult mystery section at the bookstore.

I realized, at some point while reading this, that I don’t actually remember much of what happened in the 7th season of Castle (not its best season) and I waited a lot longer before getting around to this one, so I really didn’t pick up on all the show references in the book. Which means, I was forced to take it on its own merit.

Nikki Heat has been promoted to captain and has to deal with the new pressures that come with that job. It doesn’t help that she catches a high-profile case right off the bat: the murder of a police psychologist, Lon King. HER psychologist. It’s not an easy death for Heat to deal with, especially since King had been helping her deal with her feelings about her impending marriage to Jamison Rook.

But, things aren’t always as it seems, and soon one murder turns into five (and the entire NYPD gets hacked)  as Heat and Rook try and solve this case.

Y’know, on its own merit, these still aren’t bad. The mystery was complex enough that I didn’t quite figure it out (though it did leave out one crucial piece of information, I think, in order to fully solve the mystery)  but it wasn’t super out of left field when they finally figured it all out. The plotting’s good, the writing’s not half-bad (I’ve read worse), and aside from a few editing mistakes (c’mon editors, get your act together. I know you’re trying to churn these out but, take a deep  breath and double check your work), it really is a halfway decent (if pulpy) mystery series.

Rebel of the Sands

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rebelofthesandsby Alwyn Hamilton
First sentence: “They said the only folks who belonged in Deadshot after dark were the ones who were up to no good.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: March 8, 2016
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Content: There’s some pretty disturbing violence near the end of the book. It’s in the YA section (grades 6-8) of the bookstore.

The store’s Penguin children’s rep (whom I adore, and not just because she’s got an Irish accent) told me when she handed me the ARC of this book that it was Totally Brilliant and that I was going to Totally Love It. (Just imagine that in an Irish accent. She’s great.) I said okay, I’ll read it. And then it got stuck on the back burner. Things crept up, and then A stole it from me and plowed through it. And she said that it was really really good and I should totally read it. And still it was on the back burner.

(This is less a review a more of a “why didn’t I read this SOONER” post. Sorry.)

But then a day came when I was shuffling through my shelves and piles looking for something Really Good, and this finally Called to me.

And as I plowed through the first two chapters — in which our heroine, Amani Al’Hiza finds herself in a shooting contest in order to get out of her dead-end desert town and away from her lecherous uncle and demanding aunt — and was hooked. Seriously. I was reminded of Harry from The Blue Sword and of Katsa from Graceling and I was in love. I plowed through this book like I didn’t have to work or do dishes or manage four kids in the house.  (Some people are calling it East Meets West — it’s set in a Middle Eastern-like country, with djinn but there’s guns — but I disagree. Sure, it’s pulling on all influences, but I really didn’t get the whole “Western” vibe. It’s a fantasy with guns instead of swords. I can go with that.) I loved the characters (yeah, so I called the love interest from the first chapter, but I did love the twists that came), I loved the complexity of the mythology Hamilton created, I loved that she didn’t give me a clean ending. (I didn’t love that it’s probably not a stand-alone, but at least it came to a conclusion.) It definitely hit all the right buttons for me.

Which leads me to say, don’t do what I did and put this one off. It really is THAT good.

In My Spare Time…

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I’ve been working on getting the site and dates for KidlitCon 2016 settled. I haven’t settled on a site yet, but since all the places I’m looking at have the same date open, I went ahead and settled on that.

KidlitCon 2016 will be here in Wichita on October 14 and 15.

I’ll have hotel information and a site here soon (probably within the week unless something drastic happens in my life to put that off), and then we can start working on keynote and content.

At any rate, stick the date on your calendar, and I hope to see you here!

Monthly Round-Up: February 2016

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Somehow, this month, I feel like I fell behind. I really don’t know why. Probably has something to do with four girls pulling me in four different directions, plus a husband, plus a job that takes some of my time, plus there are actually more TV shows I’m watching (one per girl, really. A quick aside, we’re actually quite liking the Shadowhunters TV series, but mostly because everyone’s so pretty to look at.). But I feel like there’s just less time for reading than there used to be.

Times and seasons, I guess.

My favorite of the ones that got read this month, though was this one:

iamprincessxI Am Princess X

There were a lot of good ones, though, this month. The rest:

YA:

salttothesea hellogoodbye schoolforbrides

Salt to the Sea
Hello, Goodbye, and Everything In Between
A School for Brides (audiobook)

Non-Fiction:

wild littledribbling radioactive

Wild (audiobook)
The Road to Little Dribbling
Radioactive

Middle Grade:

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The Key to Extraordinary
Fridays With the Wizards

Graphic Novel

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Amulet: Firelight

What were some of your favorites this month?

Amulet: Firelight

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firelightby Kazu Kibuishi
First sentence: “Okay, Emily. I think this is a good place to start.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: The Stonekeeper, The Stonekeeper’s Curse, The Cloud Searchers, The Last Council, Prince of the Elves, Escape from Lucien
Content: There’s a lot going on, and sometimes the vocabulary is a bit challenging, it’s good for a strong 2nd or 3rd grade reader. It’s in the middle grade (grades 3-5) graphic novel section of the bookstore.

Picking up where we left off in the last book…

The powers of the stone are getting more, well, powerful. Emily’s nightmares are beginning to become more intense, and her control over the stone is slipping. And yet, she and Trellis head to Algos Island to recover Trellis’s memories, so they can defeat his father, the evil Elf King. Navin meanwhile, needs to head back to the resistance and there’s a delightful side trip with a sassy robot chef (and an encounter with some elf bounty hunters) before he does. But everything (as it often happens with epic adventures) doesn’t go according to their plan.

I feel like a broken record with this series. I love it, I buy it, I read it, and I want the next one immediately. (I’m kind of beginning to think that I should have waited until all 9 were out… But then I might not have started.) I adore Kibuishi’s art. I can sense where the story is going, but I’m also wondering how it all fits together. (Mostly because I forget parts from one book to the next. I really should do a reread one of these days.) But, I’m not going to give up on Emily, Trellis and Navin. I most definitely want to see how their story ends.

Especially after this installment.

Fridays with the Wizards

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fridaysby Jessica Day George
First sentence: “It was good to be home.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: Tuesdays at the Castle, Wednesdays in the Tower, Thursdays with the Crown
Content: These books are so great for those middle readers who don’t like super long books, but want action-packed stories. Not too many difficult words, and George keeps them short and sweet. It’s in the middle grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

Now that Castle Glower is whole again and Wizard Arkwright is captured, Celie figures her work is done and she can just go back to normal. Except that normal isn’t, well, normal anymore. Lilah and Lulath are engaged (yay!) and so there are preparations to go to Grath and meet Lulath’s family. The king decides that a ship really needs to be built. And people keep bonding with all the baby griffins, though they soon learn that it’s the griffins who choose, not the people.

Celie isn’t happy with all these changes, but she can deal. Until they discover that Wizard Arkower has escaped his prison and is creeping around the secret passageways of the Castle. Celie’s the one who knows the Castle best, and so it falls on her to figure a way to capture the wizard. If she can.

This series is such a delight. I love that the family is a good one, that Celie has challenges that are outside of her family and that her family is generally supportive of her as a person. It’s wonderfully refreshing. I also enjoy that these books build on each other while offering an individual adventure that actually comes to a stopping point. No real cliffhangers, which is nice. And that she writes at a kids’ level without talking down to them. It really is a fun series. I’ll definitely be sad when it ends.

As a bonus, I got to host her here for school visits and a store event a couple weeks ago. She’s just as delightful as her books!

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Three Books for African American History Month

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I wrote this in my introduction to my newsletter:

I saw this video on Facebook a while back, and it got me thinking. Especially the part where they say that black history begins with slavery and ends with Martin Luther King, Jr. It helped that it came on the heels of the scandal surrounding A Birthday Cake for George Washington. I especially appreciated this post by author Mitali Perkins is definitely worth checking out. Both things together have made me more aware of the importance of diversity in children’s books, and made me more determined to search out more honest portrayals of black life.

I think that’s true, and as a result, I tried to find books that reflected the African American experience but didn’t have anything to do with slavery or civil rights. The three I came up with are these:

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Gordon Parks: How the Photographer Captured Black and White America by Carolyn Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Jamey Cristoph

The Magnificent Mya Tibbs: Spirit Week Showdown by Crystal Allen

When I Was the Greatest by Jason Reynolds

A confession: I haven’t read any of these. But I think it’s definitely something I can rectify.

What would you have picked?

Hello, Goodbye, and Everything In Between

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hellogoodbyeby Jennifer E. Smith
First sentence: “When Aidan  opens the door, Clare rises onto her tiptoes to kiss him, and for a moment, it feels like any other night.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered from the ARC piles at work.
Content: There’s some illusions to teenage drinking and sex, but it’s all tasteful and way off screen. If there is swearing (and now that I think about it, I’m not sure there is…), it’s all mild. It’s in the YA (grades 6-8) section of the bookstore.

Clare and Aidan have been a couple for the past two years of high school. They’ve been super happy and content in their relationship. But, it’s the night before they leave for college and they aren’t going the same place. Clare is headed to Dartmouth and Aidan for the opposite coast and UCLA. So, they’re going out this last night with one goal in mind (at least Clare’s mind): to break up. It’s a logical decision: they need to go away and be able to experience college fully, to not be constantly wondering if the other is being “faithful”. It makes sense.

Clare’s plan is to recreate memorable moments from their relationship, from where they first met through their first kiss and beyond. Except the evening doesn’t go as planned, and perhaps through the twists and turns that the evening throws at them, they can figure out exactly what to do with their relationship.

I love Smith’s romances. They’re generally sweet and simple, kind of like Baby Bear’s porridge: just right.  This one was a bit more angsty than the others I’ve read, but understandably so. I appreciated that Clare was the “logical” one and that Aidan was the more emotional center in the book; it’s a nice twist to have the girl pushing to break up and the boy wanting to stay together. And the adventures over the course of the night were fun as well. It was an interesting take on relationships as well: usually, books either deal with the falling in love part, or the ending part but I don’t know if I’ve read one where there was a “conscious uncoupling” and Gwyneth Paltrow so eloquently put it. I found that difference to be a nice change.

But while it was all nice and comfy and sweet, that’s really all it was. While it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t anything I totally fell in love with. (Ha!) Still: a good book.

The Key to Extraordinary

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keytoextraordinaryby Natalie Lloyd
First sentence: “It is a known fact that the most extraordinary moments in a person’s life come disguised as ordinary days.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy pilfered off the ARC shelves at my place of employment.
Release date: February 23, 2016
Content: It’s short(ish) and the words aren’t too terribly difficult, but there’s kind of a little romance, so maybe it’s not for the 3rd graders? It’s in the middle grade (grades 3-5) section of the bookstore.

The women in Emma’s family have had a long history of doing Extraordinary things. They have a dream, which they call their Blue Wildflower dream, and in that dream they are Shown Their Path, the way in which they’ll be extraordinary. At almost 13, Emma’s convinced that in spite of all this, her life won’t be that special. She lives in a smallish town in Tennessee, and while she loves her Grandma Blue and the cafe she runs, where Emma’s older brother is the baker, there really isn’t much else.

Then Emma gets her wildflower dream, and it doesn’t make sense.  Then developers start sniffing around the cafe, wanting to buy it, and suddenly maybe Emma can piece together some lost history and save the cafe while filling her destiny.

I liked Snicker of Magic quite a bit, and I like Southern Quirky (as Ms. Yingling calls it), but this one didn’t work for me.  I’m not sure I can pinpoint why, though. Maybe it’s a bit of a reading slump (I tossed aside about four books partially read before I settled on this one), maybe it’s that I’m a bit under the weather. Either way, Emma and her plight didn’t sit with me. It even had a Nice Moral at the end: follow your dreams and expectations and don’t let the accomplishments of the past make you intimidated (or at least I think that’s the message), but I kind of just shrugged and said, “Meh.”

Which is too bad. I did want to like this one more.