growing up

The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two

1 Comment

By Catherynn M. Valente
ages: 11+ (I’m not sure the younger set would like this one. Just saying.)
First sentence: “
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Others in the series: The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There
Review copy snagged off the ARC shelves at work.

It’s been a year since September has left Fairyland Underneath, and she aches to return. The Real World just isn’t as fun or as interesting as Fairyland. And she’s been told that she can return every year, so she waits. And waits. But no one comes. Until, one day, long after she’s expecting them, someone does come, but won’t let her in. So, desperate as she is, she breaks in. Which means she’s a Criminal. She finds that things aren’t the same as they were, encounters the Blue Wind (who’s quite obnoxious), gets sent on a Mission, and tries to fight a Yeti on the moon. Yes, it is as weird as it sounds.

But, even though there were passages I found amusing (most specifically, the description of the Lopsided Library) and characters (like the car Aroostook) I liked, I just wasn’t as charmed with this one as I was with the other two. Maybe it’s because September is Getting Older, and Valente tried to bring in not only romance (Saturday, the Marid, is in love with September), but also the Trials of Getting Older, and it just didn’t Work. (This book makes me want to Emphasize with Capital Letters. It’s an unfortunate side effect.) I skimmed more than I read, I rolled my eyes more than I laughed. I wanted to Love Ell the Wyvery and Saturday again; I wanted to Enjoy September’s journey. But my heart wasn’t in it.

I don’t know if that means it’s the writing or just that I’m getting tired of this series. Could be either. Or both.

(Just for the record: because this is a Cybils nominee, I’ve been asked to make sure y’all know this is my opinion only, and not that of the panel.)

Just One Day

1 Comment

by Gayle Forman
ages: 14+
First sentence: “What if Shakespeare had it wrong?
Support your local independent bookstore: buy it there!
Review copy provided by my place of employment.

Allyson and her best friend Melanie have just recently graduated high school, and are off on a tour of Europe. You know the type: scheduled, regimented, seeing all the highlights tour. If it’s Wednesday, we must be in Rome type of thing. Allyson, being the structured-type girl herself, is enjoying it okay, in spite of Melanie’s attempts at a re-do. She keeps saying that in college they can reinvent themselves, but at the same time, loves that Allyson is so reliably… Allyson.

Then, they meet Willem. It was a fluke: when they were in Stratford-upon-Avon, they passed up the chance to see the Royal Shakespeare Company do Hamlet in favor of seeing a company called Guerrilla Will do Twelfth Night. And it was… something. Willem, 20 and Dutch, was charming, and Allyson fell, well, in like. And the next day when they met again on the train, she decided it was kismet, and decided on a whim to go to Paris with him. For the day.

Forman really works this implausibility. (Especially for me, as a mother of four girls, I was conflicted. Part of me was: YES, PARIS!! How romantic! And it was, really. The other part of me was screaming: NOOOOOOOO!!!!) It makes sense for Allyson in that moment to make that choice, to experiment with living a life that was something other than her same structured existence. And what better place to do it than Paris? She has a marvelous day, and then… Willem’s gone. She’s alone. “It” didn’t work.

So she packs off home and heads up to college, where she tries to move on with her life. Or rather, move on with the life that her mother has assigned to her. I realized while reading this one that a lot of my ideas on parenting teens have come from reading teen novels because I could totally see where things were going to go. Helicopter mom = disastrous first semester. It wasn’t until her second semester that Allyson began to figure out how to stand up for what she wanted, how to make friends, how to find her own path instead of the one her parents made for her.

And the end? Well, let’s just say it’s a hopeful one. I’m not sure how plausible it is, but by that point, I didn’t care. I was fully invested in Allyson’s story, in her trials and her hopes and dreams. Which Foreman made come alive for me.

Besides, it’s Paris. You can’t get any better than that.