The Blue Sword

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by Robin McKinley

ages: 12+
First sentence: “She scowled at her glass of orange juice.”
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I first read The Blue Sword ages and eons ago. No, not when I was a kid, though I could have. It was soon after I first read Beauty by Robin McKinley (the book a friend gave me that I credit with my current love of YA). While I liked Beauty well enough, it was Harry Crewe and the country of Damar that I fell hard for.

Since I read this pre-blog, when I started it up, I wrote a couple sentences about my favorites. This one went like this: “The Blue Sword is full of adventure, magic, romance, swordplay… it would probably make a pretty good movie if anyone ever thought of it. It was an engaging book, well-written and the heroes were believable and interesting (there’s a lot of believable tension and chemistry between the two lead characters, which makes it fun).”

That doesn’t even begin to sum up the awesomeness that is The Blue Sword.

Harry Crewe is an orphan who has been shunted out to Damar, which lies on the outer reaches of the empire. She’s a ward of the regional head there, and is not happy about that. At all. Partially, it’s because she misses her parents, but mostly it’s because she’s unsettled. Unsatisfied. She never was the type of girl to sit still; she preferred riding and climbing to sitting and sewing. But, she’s supposed to be “proper” now, which means she looks wistfully out at the mountains, and wishes she could just do something.

Then Corlath, the king of the Hillfolk, shows up at the settlement. Nominally to try and make some sort of agreement with what they call the Outlanders, but that fails. Instead, he sees Harry, and his kelar — which is a kind of magic — demands that she come with him. So, he kidnaps her. Yes, it’s unsettling at first, but eventually she learns that the Hillfolk is where she belongs. She has the kelar, too, as strong as Corlath’s. And it becomes her Fate to be Harimand-sol, the lady Hero, and the first one since Lady Aerin to wield the Blue Sword in battle.

That’s the basic gist of it, but not the whole thing. McKinley, when she’s at her best, knows how to weave a good story. She pulls in amazing characters — my favorites are Jack Dedham, the career military guy with a soft spot for Hillfolk; and Narknon, the hunting cat that adopts Harry — and creates a vivid and detailed world but without all the exposition. She’s such a tight writer, such a gifted writer, that she’s able to do all this with a minimum of words, or without making it seem inaccessible or difficult.

In short: it’s brilliant. (And it’s more than 30 years old, without being dated in any way. That counts for a lot.)

First Sunday Daughter Reviews: August 2013

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Another in a series detailing what my (bookish) girls are reading.

It’s the end of the summer — school starts for us in a week and a half — and the girls are actually quite excited to get back. Except for M, who doesn’t have to go back. Instead, she’s preparing to go to Durgapur, India the end of September. Which means a lot of paperwork, and going to her job every morning. She does, however, find time to read, plowing through most of the Infernal Devices series. But the book that has had the most impact in recent months is this one:

She had me pick it up because Vitoria Vantoch is Misha Collins’s wife, but ended up really liking it. Which led her to consider pursuing a major in women’s studies. Which she discovered she’s really excited about. In fact, she and C are kind of planning — someday — to write a book about the history of women through and the societal impact of fashion (C’s passion right now is fashion history). It’s exciting and impressive watching her discover this.

C, on the other hand, has not really picked up a book in the last month. She tried City of Bones, and got about a third of the way through before putting it down. She’s not bailing, she said, she just doesn’t have motivation to read during the summer. She’d rather watch TV. And she has: she’s gone through the complete series of How I Met Your Mother, Vampire Diaries, The New Girl, and Supernatural. In the last month.

A asked me to pick up this at the library:

And she’s been enjoying the series (she’s nearly done). Not as well as the Percy Jackson books, but enough to talk about it, and to spend free time reading.

And what started out as a desire to see a movie with The Sea of Monsters has turned into a full-fledged Percy Jackson obsession with K.

They’re more than halfway through Battle of the Labyrinth, and K is obsessed. (A has issues: she thinks K is a poser, and I have to remind her — on more than one occasion — that she is not the True and Only Percy Jackson fan in this family, and that it’s OKAY for more than one person to like the same thing.) She’s drawing fan art, and talks about the characters. It’s really hard to keep spoilers from her, though.

On a side note: reading the series to K has got Hubby interested in it again, and he’s picked up the second series out of curiosity. Gotta love it when that happens.

Audiobook: The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie

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by Alan Bradley
read by Jayne Entwistle
ages: adult
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Flavia DeLuce is an 11-year-old aspiring chemist in 1950s England. Often at odds with her two older sisters, she mostly tries to stay out of the way. That is, when she’s not researching poisons.

Then one fateful night, her father has an argument with a stranger, who turns up dead in the cucumber patch, uttering one word: “Vale”. Flavia (of course) was there to hear it, and it sets her on a path to figure out who the murderer really is, and free her father.

On the one hand, I was thoroughly entertained by Entwistle’s reading of this book. Her voices were terrific, and she managed to keep my attention, even though I had problems with the book itself. The first one being the number of similes. Oh. My. Heavens. If I drank, I’d make a drinking game of them. And I’d be plastered by the end of chapter 2. I tried counting them, but I lost count after a dozen (within 10 minutes or so). I was complaining about them to Hubby, and he did point out that Flavia — who is a precocious child (I don’t like precocious children in adult fiction; it grates) — is the narrator, which may have something to do with the inordinate number of similes. Even so, I resigned myself to them, rolling my eyes whenever I heard one.

My other problem was that I called the murderer too early. Bradley introduced a random character about halfway through, and even though I didn’t know how or why, I knew he had to be the murderer. Why else introduce a random character. And, in many ways, I find that bad form.

But, it wasn’t a terrible waste of time — I did finish it after all. Even if it wasn’t perfect.

July 2013 Wrap-Up

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For us, this was the last full month of summer. Hot days (except we’ve gotten a lot of rain down here), boredom kicking in. The girls are at each others’ throats, and I’m tired of trying to come up with chores for them to do.

Good thing school starts in 2 weeks!

My favorite this month, hands down, was

Escape from Mr. Lemoncello’s Library

I don’t often get a chance to handsell a book from the middle grade section, but I have with this one. I’m that excited by it.

Others read this month…

Graphic Novel:

Blankets

Nonfiction:

Let’s Explore Diabetes With Owls (audio)
Mama Makes Up Her Mind

Middle Grade:

The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle
The Sasquatch Escape
Wednesdays at the Tower
The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop (DNF)

YA:

City of Fallen Angels
City of Glass
Dodger
Flicker & Burn
Interworld

Adult:

The Silver Star

What was your favorite July read?

The Sasquatch Escape

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The Imaginary Veterinary Book 1
by Suzanne Selfors
ages: 8+
First sentence: “The weird shadow swept across the sky.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Ben Silverstein is being sent to live with his grandpa for the summer. As an LA kid — the full nine yards: salons, designer jeans, pools in your backyard — the idea of spending the summer with his grandpa (whom he hasn’t seen in 6 years) in the small, run-down town of Buttonville sounds like torture.

Then, things start to happen.
He meets Pearl Petal.
He thinks he sees a dragon.
They discover that Dr. Woo’s “worm” hospital is actually a hospital for creatures from the Imaginary World.
They let loose a sasquatch (with foot fungus).
And they are tasked with catching him.

Suddenly, what was a boring summer has taken a turn for the exciting.

Selfors has written a solid early-middle grade fantasy. It’s got adventure and friendship, and enough fantastic and silly situations to be entertaining for any reader. But the narrative is simple enough that it makes a great in-between book for early or struggling readers.  And the illustrations by Dan Santat added immensely to Selfor’s storytelling, not to mention the “enrichment” activities in the back.

I’m not going to say that middle grade fantasy really needs another series, but this one is a great addition.

Flicker & Burn

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by T. M. Goeglein
ages: 12+
First sentence: “My name is Sara Jane Rispoli.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: August 20, 2013
Review copy provided by the publisher.
Others in the series: Cold Fury

When we last left Sarah Jane Rispoli (spoilers for Cold Fury, of course) she had discovered ghiaccio furioso,but has no idea how to control it. Her family has been kidnapped by some unknown assailants, and even though she’s just 16, she’s become the Counselor at Large for the Outfit, Chicago’s mob scene.  Her life goal? To get her family back in one piece.

Flicker & Burn is Sarah Jane’s increasingly complex and intense attempt to do just that. There are some pretty creepy villains: red-eye, white skinned, sexless beings driving black Mister Kreamy Kone ice cream trucks. They don’t sound terribly horrifying, but believe me: in Goeglein’s hands they are. Sarah’s best friend, Doug, gets involved in the hunt, and inadvertently discovers an even seedier underside to the Kreamy Kone empire. On top of that, Sarah’s boyfriend Max is demanding answers Sarah can’t give (or doesn’t want to; she pulls a Spider Man: pushing Max away in order to protect him). And then, relatives Sarah didn’t even know she had show up serving only to complicate things.

I have to admit that I liked this one a lot more than I did Cold Fury.  With the mob background out of the way, Goeglein was able to focus more on Sarah Jane (who is still infuriatingly stubborn) and her Quest. I liked that he explained what could be a paranormal element with science; it gave this one more credibility.

But Goeglein’s strength really lies in writing action: Sarah Jane really is a kick butt, no nonsense girl, and she fights like one. She’s a survivor, and she cares deeply, but that isn’t a weakness. I appreciate that Goeglein isn’t willing to skimp on Sarah Jane’s character just because she’s a girl. I also appreciated that she wasn’t androgynous either: she is a girl, she has feelings, and while she’s not the best at expressing them, that doesn’t make her soulless.

The ending was a bit of a setback, after all that Sarah Jane goes through, but it only served to make me curious as to where Goeglein’s taking the series next.

Bonus: While you’re waiting for the book to come out, check out the videos Ted has up about Flicker & Burn. They’re a lot of fun.

Dodger

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by Terry Pratchett
ages: 12+
First sentence: “The rain poured down on London so hard that it seemed that the rain was dancing spray, every raindrop contending with its fellow for supremacy in the air and waiting to splash down.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy snagged from the ARC shelves at work, about a year ago.

Dodger is a tosher (no, I had no idea what that was before reading this; I wonder if it has anything to do with my refusal to read Dickens) and is making a fairly decent living at it. He stays with his Jewish friend, Solomon, and his dog Onan, basically just getting by. Then one night, he witnesses a girl getting beat up, and he decides to do something: he attacks the attackers, saving the girl’s life.

That small act (well, not so small) changes Dodger’s life: he goes from a simple tosher to a Man of Importance, hob nobbing with the rich famous and powerful of Victorian London.

Okay, so it’s not quite that f simple; there are a few steps involved in Dodger’s rise. He meets Charles Dickens, who helps, as does Benjamin Disraeli. It turns out that the girl is an estranged princess, which complicates matters, but Dodger — who has fallen head over heels for her — is smart and cunning and witty enough to figure out a way to help her escape her tormentors.

As far as a Pratchett book goes, it lacked something for me. It wasn’t as funny, or as charming as I hoped it would be. Dodger is an engaging hero, though I have to admit that I found myself liking Onan the dog more. It’s an interesting re-imagining of a time period — it’s not quite historical fiction and it’s not quite fantasy — and Pratchett does paint a vivid portrait of London. However,  while the plot starts off strong, it kind of gets bogged down in the middle, even though the ending is sweet. I had to push myself to get through the slow parts, skimming quite a bit, just to keep the flow going.

In all, though, while not brilliant, not bad either.

The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop

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by Kate Saunders
ages: 8+
First sentence: “‘We’ll probably sell the place,’ Dad said, from the driver’s seat.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

I really liked Beswitched last fall, and so when I found out that Kate Saunders had a new one, I was quite interested. And the cover and title promised good things, as well.

(You know where this is going, right?)

Oz and Lily are twins — Oz is the genius, Lily has dyslexia — whose family has inherited a run-down, old chocolate shop in London. Their family up and moves there, where the kids find out that the shop, run by their great-great-uncles, was a place for magic. The chocolate (and candy) was infused with magic in order to help and entertain people (think Weasly’s Wizarding Wheezes). Except one of the brothers invented a chocolate for immortality. And another brother, Isadore, is remarkably still alive, and wants the molds so he can be immortal. (Wait: what?) With the help of a talking cat, Demerara, Oz and Lily are tasked with stopping Isadore from achieving his goal.

This one had all sorts problems. First off, the talking cat. Actually: I couldn’t get past the talking cat. I’m not a talking animals person, but sometimes I can get past that and enjoy the book. Not so with this one. I wanted to strangle the cat. I took to skipping everything the cat said and did. Then I started skipping around in the book, because without the talking cat, there’s not much left. There was something in there about Isadore being more misguided than evil (even though he kidnaps Oz), but by that point, I honestly didn’t care enough to find out why.

Chalk this one up to good premise, lousy execution.

City of Fallen Angels

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by Cassandra Clare
ages: 14+
First sentence: “‘Just coffee, please.'”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: City of Bones, City of Ashes, City of Glass

I have to admit after finishing City of Glass, I wasn’t too sure I wanted to read this one. Clare wrapped up everything so nicely (with a bow and fireworks, too), that I figured what more was there to tell of the story?

Oh, ye of little faith.

This one picks up a few weeks after City of Glass ends, and everything seems okay. Simon is dating both Maia and Isabelle (oh silly, adorable Simon), and is trying to eke out as normal a life as possible. Magnus and Alec are dating (have I mentioned how much I adore Magnus? And I really do want to read the short story about why he’s banned in Peru). Jace and Clary are an item. But, because this book would be all sorts of boring without conflict, things start to go south.

Someone is trying to kill Simon. Jace is pulling away from Clary because of nightmares he’s having. And on top of that, Camille the vampire is back. Oh, and someone is trying to make demon babies.

This one, admittedly, is darker and more intense than the previous three. There isn’t nearly enough snark, and while Jace and Clary have some sexytimes (almost), I still wanted to smack both of them over the head. Thankfully, though, it’s not their story. Clare uses this to flesh out Simon (more Simon!) and his transition into being a vampire. It’s not pretty. She also uses it to flesh out Maia — we learn about how she became a werewolf — and Isabelle, who is no longer a stuck up fashionista. I was told it wasn’t as good as the original series, but I have to admit that I liked it as much as the other ones.

Clare’s a smart, fun writer, and she’s definitely got me hooked.

The Silver Star

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by Jeannette Walls
ages: adult (though it would be okay for a 14+ teen)
First sentence: “My sister saved my life when I was just a baby.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

I read The Glass Castle so many years ago that I didn’t have much memory of it outside of a general liking of it. So, I went into reading The Silver Star with a fairly open mind. The only real prejudice was that I heard this was a good YA crossover. Which was enough to get me to pick it up.

And, surprisingly (to me at least), I quite liked it.

Sisters Liz and Bean (whose real name is Jean) have grown up with their artist/flake of a mom, moving constantly, and dealing with her occasional disappearing acts. Then one time, she doesn’t come back. Liz and Bean manage for a while, but when people start poking their noses around, they decide to up and go across the country to visit the uncle they’ve never met in their mom’s hometown of Byler, Virginia.

Their Uncle Tinsley takes them in, but they find that living in small town Virginia is has own set of challenges. (Especially in 1970-71, which is when this takes place.) In addition to the whole new kids in town feeling, the girls find they have to deal with a lot of Small Town History. The Hollidays used to be the mill owners, and used to be Big People in Town, but have been fading over the years. The current mill manager — Mr. Maddox — is a real piece of work (that’s being nice; ominous music started in my brain about page 100), and there’s a bit of a feud between him and Tinsley. And that only intensifies when Maddox assaults Liz.

Two things I think Walls really got: 1970s politics, and smart kids. The former was evident not only in the race relations, which admittedly she just breezed over, but in the politics of sex crimes. While the way the town and the legal system treated Liz, I was glad Walls wasn’t tempted to modernize this. (Though I wonder how “modern” the legal system really is in this area.) It helped the authenticity and feel of the novel overall.

I also appreciated that she didn’t glorify either small towns or the South; it’s all laid out there, the good and the bad, for better or for worse. And for some people — like Liz and Bean’s mom — it is worse. But that said, family doesn’t necessarily mean blood. And in tough times, good people stick together.

It’s a quick read, and well worth the time.