Once Upon a Time VI

2 Comments
I think, at some point, I stopped counting all the general fantasy that I read, so this isn’t a complete list. At any rate, I’m more than happy that Carl’s still giving me an excuse (although I don’t really need one) to clear out my fantasy lists every spring. This is what I read:

Fantasy:
Grave Mercy, Robin LaFevers The Floating Islands, by Rachel Neumeier
Huntress, by Malinda Lo
Hex Hall, by Rachel Hawkins
Castle in the Air, by Diana Wynne Jones
Demonglass, by Rachel Hawkins
Spell Bound, by Rachel Hawkins
Girl of Fire and Thorns, by Rae Carson
Dealing with Dragons, by Patricia Wreade
Searching for Dragons, by Patricia Wreade

My favorites for these were Grave Mercy (of course; though I haven’t been able to find a person to sell it to at the store, which depresses me greatly) and the Hex Hall series.

Mythology:
Ilium by Dan Simmons.
The Lost Code, by Kevin Emerson
The Serpent’s Shadow, by Rick Riordan

Rick Riordan wins, every time. Though I did like The Lost Code, too. Ilium, not so much.

Folklore:
Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

Fairy Tales:
Cinder, by Marissa Meyer.
Fables: book one, by Bill Willingham

I’m glad I read both, because I really enjoyed Fables and I’m glad I know what Cinder’s about now. 

What were your favorites?

Out of the Dust (reread)

5 Comments

by Karen Hesse
ages: 11+
First sentence: “As summer wheat came ripe, so did I, born at home, on the kitchen floor.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

My original “review”, from a long, long time ago was this: “Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse: Free-verse poetry about the Dust Bowl in Kansas. I’m not crazy about the free-verse idea; I found it difficult to ‘get into’ the story.”

First off: I was wrong. It’s the pan-handle of Oklahoma, not Kansas. Now that I live here, that’s a very important distinction to make. We’re not just all plains states lumped into one category out here.

Secondly: I’ve come to  actually really like novels in verse. And I think it suits this book; it’s spare like the environment is out here, especially during the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. It works as a form, and it doesn’t bog the story down.

That said, this book is SO depressing. 

It’s the story of Billy Jo, age 14, in 1934, the height of the Great Depression. It’s just her and her parents, out on the prairie; her father keeps trying to beat the odds and grow some wheat. Her mother is pregnant when tragedy strikes and both she and the baby die. Billy Jo, who is also injured in the accident, and her dad stick it out, trying to make everything work, even as it all is falling apart.

See? Not exactly cheery.

Other than elegance of the form and the depressing story, there isn’t much to say. It’s not my favorite out of the Newbery winners, but it’s not too bad, either.

Yes, Chef

1 Comment

by Marcus Samuelsson
ages: adult
First sentence: “I have never seen a picture of my mother.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Release date: June 26, 2012
Review copy provided by my place of employment.

I am not really into the whole food “scene”. I love reading books about good food, I like cooking (but I’m a cook, not a chef, even though I worked in a restaurant for a year when I was a teenager), and I like the idea of good food, but when it comes to names of chefs, I’m pretty much limited to the really popular Food Network people.

So, before a Random House rep came into the store pitching hot books this summer, I  had never heard of Marcus Samuelsson. I think that was a good thing, however, because I was able to come to his story free of biases, open to whatever journey he was willing to take me on.

And it’s quite the journey: Born in Ethiopia, he, his mother and his sister contracted tuberculosis when Marcus was 2. His mother walked for days to get to a hospital, dying soon after reaching there, leaving the children orphaned. Luckily, there was an older couple in Sweden who were desperate for children, not caring what color or nationality they were, and they adopted both Marcus and his sister.

Samuelsson spends quite a bit of the book on his childhood and upbringing in Sweden, primarily because he firmly believes that this was the foundation for all his successes. His mother’s mother taught him to cook, in the classic Swedish style. His parents taught him the work ethic that made Samuelsson what he his today, and supported his journeys around the world, as well as his choice of career. These parts of the book are fascinating: from his stages (I guess that’s what they’re called) in Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, and New York before the ultimate stage in France and then back to America where he became — almost by accident — the executive chef of Aquavit. He is liberal with praise for the people who helped him, candid about the people who were jerks, he muses about the idea of race in the restaurant and food world. But always, always these reflections are centered around his food journey and his chasing the flavor around the world.

The latter third of the book, his time at Aquavit, his stint on Top Chef masters (and winning that competition), to his finding his birth family in Ethiopia and opening his current restaurant, Red Rooster, in Harlem are not as compelling as the first part, though they still hold interest. The time line gets a little fuzzy, and I felt like he was rushing through things, when I wanted him to linger, especially on the flavors and the tastes of the food he was creating.

Even with that slight drawback, it’s a marvelous foody memoir. Enough that I would love to step into his world, just to taste the dishes he made sound so delicious. Anyone up for a trip to Harlem?

Calling on Dragons

2 Comments

by Patricia Wrede
ages: 9+
First sentence: “Deep in the Enchanted Forest, in a neat gray house with a wide porch and a red roof, lived the witch Morwen and her nine cats.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there! 
Others in the series: Dealing with Dragons, Searching for Dragons

It’s about a year after Cimorene and Mendenbar got married, and things are afoot in the Enchanted Forest. Again. (Yes, it is the wizards. Again.) This time, Morwen was clued into the problems by a six-foot-tall rabbit named Killer. Things get a little trickier when they — Morwen, the cats, and Killer, of course — get to the castle to find out that the wizards have stolen the sword that the magic of the Enchanted Forest is tied to.

Unfortunately, that means Mendenbar (unfortunately, in A’s opinion) has to stay in the forest, while everyone else (including Killer) goes off to find the sword and get it back from those nasty wizards. They end up on a few adventures, and in some interesting pickles. Eventually, the six-foot-tall rabbit ends up a six-foot-tall blue floating donkey with wings, but that’s neither here nor there, really.

In fact, that’s kind of what we thought of this book, as well. A lost interest in it; even though I read it out loud to her, she bailed about 2/3 of the way through. And the ending — which practically requires you to read book 4 — was highly irritating.

We should have bailed at the last book, but now that I’ve come this far, I think I’m just going to have to read the next one just to see how it ends.

At Yellow Lake

Leave a comment

by Jane McLoughlin
ages: 14+
Review copy provided by my place of employment.

I was asked to read this at work, because we get some sort of “credit” for doing so. (I have no idea what this is.) They told me up front, that I didn’t have to finish it, that I only had to give it a try.

Good thing.

Because I hated it.

Well, hated it a strong word. I didn’t hate it. But, I spent a good portion of 200 pages or so I gave this book (It’s a 400 page book!) trying to figure out just who the audience was.

The book is, nominally, the story of three kids: 14-year-old Etta, who has moved to northern Minnesota with her mom to escape her mom’s bad ex-boyfriend (who, of course, turns up); 15-year-old Peter, a kid from England, who has come on his own to Yellow Lake to bury his mom’s fingernails, his mom’s dying request; and 16-year-old Jonah, an Ojibwe Indian who is trying to find his roots. It’s also, nominally, a mystery: there are Creepy Things going on at Yellow Lake, because the jacket flap says the kids lives are supposed to be threatened. I never got that far, though.

See, the book is way too angsty (and not thriller-y enough) to be targeted toward the upper-middle grade crowd. Not to mention the half a dozen f-bombs, and assorted other swearing. (Yes, I know kids swear in middle school; you just don’t see it in books unless it’s geared toward the high schoolers.) But, the story is too slow, too pedestrian, too… middle grade … to truly appeal to the teen crowd.

(Is this a good time to mention that the cover is hideous?)

Aside from the lack of audience, the book is okay. I was never really interested in the characters: out of the three, Jonah’s story seemed to have the most going for it, but by the time Peter and Etta showed up, it was turning into a horrible love-triangle, and I just didn’t have the patience for that.

Maybe the mystery would have been interesting, but after reading for half the book, I decided I wasn’t invested enough to continue.

Perhaps someone else will be, though.

Spy School

1 Comment

by Stuart Gibbs
ages:10+
First sentence: “‘Hello, Ben,’ said the man in my living room.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

Ben is basically your average kid. He goes to a regular school, is a regular loser, and aside from being a math whiz, there’s really nothing special about him.

So, it’s to his surprise when Alexander Hamilton, of the CIA, shows up at his house, inviting Ben to join this super-secret, super-exclusive spy-in-training school.

Well, who wouldn’t jump at the chance?

 Except, once he gets to spy school, Ben realizes that things aren’t exactly what they seem. Sure, he makes some friends, develops a crush on a super-hot 3rd year girl (who also happens to be a great spy), but it turns out that he’s well, a fall-guy. And there’s a mole in the school. And people are out to kill Ben.

The question is: will he survive long enough to find out who?

I hoped this one would be all the fun of Belly Up and maybe more. I mean: espionage, a cool cover, a spy school, and a mystery? What could go wrong?

Well…. it’s not that it went wrong, it’s more that it just didn’t go right enough. Ben was a bit of a wash as a main character; it’s not that I never connected with him, it’s just that Erica — his crush, and the one who makes the plot move — so outshines Ben that it’s hard to really connect with him. I felt like he was the loser sidekick for most of the book (sure, he comes through in the end), which is okay, but not what I was expecting. On the other hand, Gibbs never really quite got the fish-out-of-water thing quite right either.

Still, the mystery is solid, and while the Big Reveal comes a little out of left field, there are enough clues that perhaps someone who was paying better attention than I could figure it out.

It was a decent second effort; I just wish is was more.

The Phantom Tollbooth

2 Comments

by Norton Juster
ages: 10+
First sentence: “There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself — not just sometimes, but always.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!

I missed this one as a kid. I don’t know how; it seems like it would have been the perfect one for a pretentious reader like myself. But, for whatever reason, I didn’t first encounter the Tollbooth until I was married, and Hubby (who loved the book as a kid) introduced it to me. I bought it early on in our marriage for him (we own the 35th anniversary edition), read it, loved it, and didn’t pick it up again.

So, when I was asked by a friend to review it for her website (she’s working me through a bunch of Middle Grade classics), I was excited to pick it up again, especially since I didn’t remember it well enough to write a lengthy review.

The story, if you haven’t read this yet, is about a boy named Milo, who is constantly and persistently bored. One day, he comes home from school to find a tollbooth with instructions: “Easily assembled at home, and for use by those who have never traveled in the lands beyond.” Curious, he assembles it, gets in his little car, and heads off to have Adventures. He visits lands, meets an actual “watchdog”, rescues princesses, and makes it home in time for dinner.  (And it was still hot?)

This book is has clever coming out of it in spades. So much so, that I think, even though it’s geared towards middle grade kids, the older you are, the more you get out of it. While it can work as a adventure book, if you know about “jumping to conclusions”, if you have a grasp of idioms, if you get the whole double meanings of our language, you’ll get just how wonderfully clever this book is.

It’s also surprised me just how didactic it is. Juster has a Moral Hammer (“Knowledge is good. Boredom is bad. Get out there and Observe the World with all its Wonders.”) and he pounds. it. over. your. head. But, honestly? You don’t mind. Because it’s fun. It’s clever. It’s interesting. It’s amusing. And yeah, maybe you’ll even get the moral in the end (it’s pretty dang hard to miss), and Do Something About It.

Even if you don’t, it’s a ingenious middle grade book. And definitely worth reading.

48 Hour Book Challenge Finish Line

6 Comments

I need to do this quickly: it’s breakfast time, and I’m off to church soon…

Starting time: 7 a.m. Friday
Finish time: 7 a.m. Sunday

Total time read: 18.25 hours. I read less this time, though I think I had more time to read. I think, this year, I took more breaks. (I know I did: I ended up watching a couple episodes of Castle, season 1 with C on Friday night — because how could I resist? And a few episodes of The Big Bang Theory, season 1 with both C and A on Saturday night. Yes, I gave up precious reading hours for TV this year.)

Books read: 7

There was also a 45 minute period — which I counted — where I went through about 5 books, abandoning them after about 35 pages because I wasn’t in the mood to read them. (I started The Downside of Being Up, which really is about a kid who gets unwanted erections — after about 25 pages, mostly because in the those 25 pages, there were more euphemisms for penis and erection that I could count. Well, actually, I was counting, and after more than 2 dozen, I decided that it wasn’t my type of book.) 

Favorite reads: Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life, Stickman Odyssey

Total time blogged: 3.2 hours

Total time:  21.5 hours

Not my best year; I really was aiming for 24 hours or more. But, I still had a grand time. And since my $1 an hour is less than $25, I’m going to donate the $25 to RIF.

And as a little bonus, my favorite geek being bookish:

As always, thanks Pam, for this! I had a blast.

Stickman Odyssey: The Wrath of Zozimos

2 Comments

by Christopher Ford
ages: 11+

Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by the publisher

First off: this is the second in a series. I have no idea how I ended up on a list to have this one sent to me — I didn’t request it! — but I’m sure glad I did. I’m definitely going to find the first one now.

For this reason alone: it is one of the more clever interpretations of mythology that I’ve seen in a long, long time.

It’s been forever and a day since I’ve read the Odyssey, and I don’t remember squat from it. The good news: you don’t really need to have read it to enjoy this one. In fact, you don’t really need to have read the first one in the series, either. I’m sure it helps if you have, but it’s not truly necessary.

What I really liked was the combination of Greek mythology, a really cool adventure story, and base humor. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading a for a long(ish) time this weekend, but I found lines like “I am Artemis, the Huntress Goddess of this forest and all wild things including bears!” and “I’m so hungry, all I’m pooping are farts!”  and “Did you dim, little mortals EAT my beloved sheepies?” to be really funny. (They are in context, promise.)  This graphic novel has Boy written all over it. Not that I minded.

As for the art: the stick figures (because it’s the Stickman Odyssey) work. Honest. It’s not great art, but it’s a gimmick, and in this situation, it’s a good one. It’s silly, it’s fun, it’s interesting, and maybe it’d even get someone to look up who the heck Nyx is.

Here’s to more Stickman adventures!

Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

3 Comments

by Wendy Mass
ages: 10+
First sentence: “My sweat smells like peanut butter.”
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy won in a contest sponsored by the publisher (I think.)

Things you need to know:
1. Jeremy Fink is nearly 13 years old and Lizzie is his best friend, NOT girlfriend. (It’s hard to be romantic about someone whose diapers your mother changed.)

2. His father died five years ago, at the age of 39. A fortune teller in Atlantic City told him he wouldn’t live past 40.

3. He has received a box, from his dad, that has “The Meaning of Life” on it. Only problem: it needs four keys to open, and all are missing. He’s supposed to open this box on his 13th birthday.

4. Which means that Jeremy and Lizzie have exactly a month to find the keys. In New York City.

Sounds impossible, or at least improbable, and it is. But what comes out of their searching is a sweet, funny, touching story about a boy learning about what life Really Means. The most wonderful thing about this book is that it’s insightful and not preachy, yet full of good Lessons. I adore Wendy Mass for exactly this reason. It’s a gem.