Mouseheart, by Lisa Fiedler, generously illustrated by Vivienne To (Simon and Schuster, middle grade, in stores May 20, 2014) is the fast-paced story of a mouse of destiny set in the subterranean depths of New York city. I'm happy to be able to offer a giveaway along with my own thoughts--scroll down for details.

When I am about to read a book in which a mouse is the hero, I ask myself my "mouse questions" (which I am actually formulating right now for the first time--they have previously been an amorphous swirl, because that's how I think).   NB:  If the hero of a book were to be a fish, "fish" could be substituted for "mouse," etc.

1.  If all the mice and other animal characters were people, would the plot be appreciably different?  Would my emotional response be any different? 

2.  And following from that, is there any "mousiness" to the main character?   If I were never told he or she was a mouse, would I suspect that there was something not-human going on?  Does the fact that the rodents wear clothes and fight with swords distract me?

Maybe these questions wouldn't actually work for fish, because, you know, water.  But the basic point of them is that if I am to read a book in which a mouse is a hero, I want there to be some point to the mousiness.  And so, as I read Mouseheart, I pondered these questions.

Here is the gist of the story:

Down below New York city is Atlantia, small, gated utopia of rats.   It is guarded by cats, whose queen has signed a treaty with the emperor of the rats.  Up above is a pet store, from which three young mouse siblings escape.  One of these, Hopper, our hero, falls into the New York subway system, where he is taken under the paw of a young, swashbuckling rat who turns out to be the utopia's prince.

Hopper wants to find both his siblings and a safe home, but he finds himself drawn deep into the world of those who want to bring down Atalantia.   He does not want to be drawn into revolution and rebellion--he wants to believe in the utopia.    Nor is Hopper enthusiastic when the rebel mice hail him as a chosen mouse of destiny, savior of the rebellion (that bit about him believing in the utopia makes being a hero of the  rebel cause tricky).  But destiny can be hard to avoid...especially once you realize that the utopia comes with a terrible, terrible price (that whole bit about the treaty between the cats and the rats?  It has a Dark Underside of a not unexpected, biologically-sound, sort).

So the fact that the main characters are rodents is absolutely essential for the plot to work, and to have powerful emotional heft when the Dark Underside is revealed.   And allowing the rodents and cats to be rather advanced, viz trappings of civilizations, lifted the above animal adventure into the territory of fantasy epic, that I thinks adds to its kid appeal.   Perhaps more could have been made of the physical qualities that distinguish rodents from people (like keen sense of smell, and the use of whiskers), but I felt I was at least getting a mouse-perspective on the New York subway system, which made up for that.   Though there was a sense that the characters were simply small people, it was not so much an issue that it broke my suspension of disbelief.

Mouseheart is one I'd recommend to readers seeking an animal-based entrée into the world of false utopias--it has engaging main characters, dark undercurrents, and a vivid setting.  That being said, I do have a rather strong reservation about making a blanket recommendation.   In the very first scene, the actions of a mouse and a rat end up causing a hostile cat's eye to be graphically impaled on a spike.  I think many readers, especially those who love cats, will put the book down right there.  I myself was worried that there would be more graphic violence, but this was the worst, and was much more horrible than the confrontations to come (also involving the dark side to rodent/cat relationships, but less specifically so).

I have another minor reservation, that's more something that didn't work for me personally--Hopper's sister ends up messing up their escape from the pet shop because she can't control the desire to bite its owner.  But she blames Hopper, and he just takes it.   This made her totally unsympathetic, and Hopper seem a bit wet.

In any event, Mouseheart has gotten excellent reviews from Publishers Weekly--  "For those who love an underdog and some romping good battles, Fiedler thoroughly entertains" and from Kirkus--"Riddled with surprises, the fast-paced, complex plot features a host of vivid, memorable rodent and feline characters.... Another stalwart mouse with a brave heart will win fans in this captivating underground adventure."  I agree that many young readers will enjoy this lots (just so long as they aren't too terribly fond of cats.....).


Courtesy of the publisher, I'm happy to offer this great giveaway of Mouseheart plus The Search for WondLa and Belly Up!  Just leave a comment (perhaps sharing your own favorite mouse fantasy) between now and 8:30 am Monday morning and you'll be entered!

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Welcome to this week's round-up, and Happy Mother's Day to all those who celebrate it.   I am celebrating it by cleaning up after my children, in particular cleaning up after my 11 year old's birthday party, which is the reason I'm late getting this post up. 

But I would like to take this opportunity to thank my own mother (not that she reads my blog) for reading me The Silmarilian.   Lots of parents read The Hobbit to their kids, many read The Lord of the Rings, but only really special mothers (with special children) read every word of The Silmarilian (which is something I haven't done, but in fairness, it was easier/more interesting for my mother to do it because it was her first time reading it too). 

In any event.

The Reviews:

The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, by Terry Pratchett, at Fantasy Literature

Ancient Fire, by Mark London Williams, at Charlotte's Library

The Bravest Princess, by E.D. Baker, at Ms. Yingling Reads

The Castle Behind Thorns, by Merrie Haskell, at Log Cabin Library

The Door, by Andy Marino, at On Starships and Dragon Wings

Dragon Slippers, by Jessica Day George, at On Starships and Dragon Wings

The Dyerville Tales, by M.P. Kozlowsky, at Page In Training
and The Book Monsters

The Forbidden Library, by Django Wexler, at Bestfantasybooks

The Ghosts of Tupelo Landing, by Sheila Turnage, at Semicolon

Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods, by Suzanne Collins, at Fyrefly's Book Blog

The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw, by Christopher Healey, at The Book Monsters and Sharon the Librarian

The Invisible Order, by Paul Crilley, at The Book Brownie

The Islands of Chaldea, by Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones, at Librarian of Snark 

The Little White Horse, by Elizabeth Goudge, at Tor

The Mark of the Dragonfly, by Jaleigh Johnson, at Nerdy Book Club

The Night Gardener, by Jonathan Auxier, at Waking Brain Cells, The Book Monsters, and Karissa's Reading Review

Nightingale's Nest, by Nikki Loftin, at Geo Librarian

The Peculiar, by Stefan Bachmann, at Librarian of Snark

The Riverman, by Aaron Starmer, at Kid Lit Geek

The Shadow Throne, by Jennifer Nielsen, at Reads For Keeps

Stonewall Hinkleman and the Battle of Bull Run, by Michael Hemphill and Sam Riddleburger, at Madigan Reads

The Thickety, by J.A. White, at The Social Potato

Three Pickled Herrings (Wings and Co.), by Sally Gardner, at Wondrous Reads

The Unicorn Thief, by R.R. Russell, at Word Spelunking

Two Rumplestiltskin retelligs at thebookshelfgargoyle



Authors and Interviews

M.P.  Kozlowsky (The Dyerville Tales) at The Book Monsters and The Haunting of Orchid Forsythia (giveaways)

Nikki Loftin (Nightingale's Nest) at The Book Cellar

R.R. Russell (The Unicorn Thief) at Wondrous Reads 

Daniel Nanavati (Midrak Earthshaker) Carpinello's Writing Pages


Other Good Stuff

The finalists for the Locus Awards (chosen by readers of Locus Magazine) have been announced, and here are the Young Adult finalists, which include two that are more Middle Grade:
 

Save the date!  June 6-8 is the 9th Annual 48 Hour Book Challenge, organized by MotherReader.  To continue the momentum of #WeNeedDiverseBooks, this year's challenge is "dedicated to reading, sharing and reviewing books that show diversity in all ways."

And speaking of links, here's a lovely roundup of book diversity links at Jen Robinson's Book Page 

Thoughts on boys and fairy tale movies and gendered merchandise at Once Upon a Blog (my response is to advocate keeping children away from merchandising altogether, raising them in a world as far away as possible from the pressures of late stage capitalism... although I did just buy a Lego Movie tie in lego set.....).

The latest issue of Middle Shelf Magazine is out, with lots of good spec. fic. content.



Thanks for stopping by, and please let me know if I missed your post!

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Sophie, In Shadow, by Eileen Kernaghan (Thistledown Press, YA, March 2014)

Two years ago, sixteen-year-old English girl Sophie survived the sinking of the Titanic, but her parents did not.  Still haunted by that tragedy, she's sent off to India, to stay with distant cousins--Tom, a zoologist working at the Indian Museum, Jean, his novelist wife, and their girl, Alex.  Sophie has prepared herself for "India" by reading (both non-fiction and Kipling), but nothing can prepare her for what happens once she arrives.

Tragedy and culture-shock combine to wake in Sophie a gift of sorts--her perceptions of both past and future become strangely sharpened.  And her visions will make her a player in the tail end of Kipling's Great Game--the game of intrigue, political machinations, and spying in which European powers, and now Indian nationalists, shape the future of the country.  World War I is underway in Europe, and plots are afoot in India that may well destroy both Sophie's new family and British control of the sub-continent.

I approach fiction about India, especially fiction involving young English girls with supernatural abilities, with a certain amount of caution, looking carefully for stereotypes, romanticization, and neo-colonial baggage.   Happily, Sophie, In Shadow did a good job of not bothering me!  In large part this is because we stick closely to Sophie's point of view--she is aware that she has a lot of learning to do, and is willing to question the social norms of the very tail end of the British raj.  It is still very much a European point of view, but the reader can't reasonably expect more from this particular character's story.

There was much I enjoyed--I am a huge fan of Kipling's Kim, so it was great to see Sophie becoming involved in the last years of the Great Game, including a bit where a German agent is pursued through the mountains!  And I am also a fan of being educated through historical fiction--before reading this book, I had not particular thoughts on what was happening in India during WW I.  And Sophie herself, and her cousins, are interesting characters with believable motivations, interests, and aspirations.  Added interest came from a secondary character, a friend of Jean's who was a real person--Alexandra David-Néel , a French-Belgian spiritualist, anarchist, Buddhist, writer, and explorer.  I may well have to seek out more about her!

The paranormal elements of the story are enough to add fantastic zest, but are not so much so as to make Sophie a special snowflake saving India (thank goodness!).  Sophie's visions do not take over the book--for the most part, it reads as historical fiction--so don't expect this to be full-blown paranormal fantasy.

In short, Sophie, in Shadow is historical fantasy that both educates and entertains, that I particularly recommend to fans of Kim!

(note:  Jean and Tom and Alexandra were the central characters in Kernaghan's earlier book, Wild Talent, but it is not at all necessary to have read that first).

disclaimer: review copy received from the author

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My eagle-eyed friend Tanita spotted this in Publishers Weekly yesterday, and sent it my way:  "Anne Hoppe at Clarion Books has bought the U.S. rights to Dragons at Crumbling Castle, a middle-grade collection by Terry Pratchett, illus. by Mark Beech. The 14 stories originally appeared in Buck's Free Press, a newspaper in Buckinghamshire; Pratchett, before becoming a novelist, was a reporter and contributed a number of stories to the paper's Children's Circle section. A publication date has not been finalized..."

Whoot!  Thanks, Tanita!

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Sometimes a reader just has to ask "does the sentient dinosaur boy actually add anything to the story?"   In the case of Ancient Fire (Danger Boy, book 1), by Mark London Williams (2001), I'm happy to say that he does. But before we meet this particular sentient dinosaur from an alternate reality, a lot of other things have to happen.

It is 2019.  Physics has advanced, to the point that two scientists, husband and wife, have made a breakthrough that may allow time travel to be a workable proposition.  A secret government agency is very interested indeed in the ramifications of this...and its agents have invaded the lab where the research is being carried out, and are pushing the experiments to dangerous levels.  So much so that the female scientist disappears, as it were, in a puff of (metaphoric) time smoke.  Her husband, desperate to escape from government control, flees across country with their son, Eli, but the government agents track them, and force the work to continue.  And when Eli incautiously interferes with an experiment, he becomes unlocked in time himself!

In the meantime, a young saurian lad is headed out on a mission to an alternate earth, because this is what all young saurians do in middle school.  The physics of his journey collides with Eli's first rush through time, and they find themselves in ancient Alexandria, just in time to be attacked by an angry mob.   There they meet Thea, daughter of Hypatia, librarian of Alexandria.  After some bouncing in time/near death at the hands of angry mob/manipulation by government agents/the revelation that Eli's mom might be alive in the 1930s/a plague that might have been brought from the past/an angry rhino, the book ends....with lots more story left to be told!

Basically, the sentient dinosaur boy, Clyne, made the book for me.   Without him, it would be generic science-driven time travel for the young; with him, there's lovely cross-cultural exploration, with bonus surrealism.  He's the most engaging character, qua character, as well--perhaps because Eli and Thea are both in such unhappy and anxious states that they don't add much lightness to story (Clyne's major worry, until he's in mortal peril himself,  is the grade he's going get), but mostly because he's such a pleasant, inquisitive, optimistic sentient dinosaur that I liked him lots.

The book also offers a nice introduction to the burning of the Great Library of Alexandria, for those anxious to learn about the past (harrowing, though, to watch the scrolls go up in smoke), and for those who are physics geeks, doubtless the science of nanoparticles and the nature of time and space will provide interesting fodder for critical thought.

I enjoyed this one a lot more than I though I was going to.  It is the first of a series (Danger Boy), and for Clyne's sake I'll actively look for the next book, Dragon Sword--even though the introduction of Arthur and Merlin as allies sends up even more red flags that sentient dinosaurs do! Try this one on the imaginatively adventurous nine or ten year old who enjoys a swirl of complicated plot, sooner rather than later, because 2019 is almost here....and although the book is not that dated yet, physics keeps getting stranger in real life....

(The only other sentient saurian character I can think of is the one in Sherri Tepper's Gibbon's Decline and Fall, which I've whited out the title of because it is a spoiler.  And I didn't mind it there either, so maybe I am more open-minded viz dinosaurs than I think I am.  I still have no desire to read Anne McCaffery's Dinosaur Planet books though).

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The Return of Zita the Spacegirl, by Ben Hatke (FirstSecond, May 13, 2014)

The moment I saw Zita the Spacegirl, way back in 2011, I fell in book love.  So did my boys.

Zita is back for her third adventure, and for those of us (me and boys) who are die-hard fans, the third book of her adventures does not disappoint.  We get to see old friends, meet new characters (some cute, some grotesque; some lovable, some despicable), and we get to Zita being her intrepid, warm-hearted, impetuous self. 

Her adventures in this book take her to pretty dark places.  She is a prisoner, sentenced to work in the mines on a prison planet, and it is rather distressing.  If you think your child is not quite ready for rather grim forced labor with shackles, hold off a tad.  I wouldn't, for instance, hurry to give this to a sensitive six or even seven year old.

But, on the other hand, if you are looking for books for eight-year-olds on up that utterly prove that boys will read books with girls, turn to Zita!  My own boys have read our copies many, many times.  Zita is pretty much the most fiercely caring heroine around today I can think of; despite the resolution to the series that comes at the ending of this book, I can't help but hope that we will see more of her.

I love Hatke's drawings, and I very much appreciated the back matter Hatke provides here which includes a lovely sample of character sketches.  He also tells the story of how Zita came to be, which was fun!


Here's a preview at Tor.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

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Yay!  It is sunny and it is May.  And here's what I found in my blog reading this week of interest to us fans of middle grade speculative fiction.  Let me know if I missed yours.

The Reviews:

The Blue Sword, by Robin McKinley, at Views From the Tesseract

Dealing With Dragons, by Patricia C. Wrede, at Fantasy Review Barn

Doll Bones, by Holly Black, at Ciara Reads Books

The Dyerville Tales, by M.P. Kozlowsky, at Charlotte's Library

Half Upon a Time, by James Riley, at Tales of the Marvelous

Horizon, by Jenn Reese, at The Book Smugglers

House of Secrets, by Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini, at Readaraptor

How to Catch a Bogle, by Catherine Jinx, at Good Books and Good Wine (audiobook review)

In the Keep of Time, by Margaret J. Anderson, at Charlotte's Library

The Interupted Tale, by Maryrose Wood, at alibrarymama

The Kindling, by Braden Bell, at Always in the Middle

The Lost Children, by Carolyn Cohagan, at Puss Reboots

Masterpiece, by Elise Broach, at Dead Houseplants

The Monster in the Mudball, by S.P. Gates, at Akossiwa Ketoglo

Operation Bunny, by Sally Garnder, at Booklist Online

Peter Nimble and His Fantastic Eyes, by Jonathan Auxier, at The Reading Hedgehog

Project Xcaliber, by Greg Pace, at Middle Grade Mafioso

Red Riding Hood Gets Lost, by Joan Holub and Suzanne Williams, at Candace's Book Blog

The Ride of Your Life (Creepover #18), by P.J. Night, at Ms. Yingling Reads

The Riverman, by Aaron Starmer, at For Those About to Mock

Rose and the Lost Princess, by Holly Webb, at In Bed With Books

The Sceaming Staircase, by Jonathan Stroud, at Hidden in Pages

Seven Wild Sisters, by Charles de Lint, at The Book Monsters

The Water Castle, by Megan Frazer Blakemore, at Librarian of Snark

When Did You See Her Last?, by Lemony Snicket, at Semicolon and Sonderbooks

A World Without Princess, by Soman Chainani, at A Reader of Fictions (audiobook review)

A passel of books at Ms. Yingling Reads-- The Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw, The Forbidden Library, The Ninja Librarians and the Accidental Keyhand, and The Islands of Chaldea

Authors and Interviews

Marisa de los Santos and David Teague (Saving Lucas Biggs) at The Write Stuff with giveaway

Dianne Salernie (The Eighth Day) at Literary Rambles, with giveaway

Holly Webb (Rose and the Lost Princess) at Literary Rambles, with giveaway

Anne Ursu gave a great keynote speech at the year's Children's and Young Adult Literature Conference, which you can read here at The Loft .  Here's a teaser:  "This is the age where the world gets a little bigger every day, when your mind is still taking in everything it can, when adults stop shielding the hard things from you. Books are a small place to explore a big world. They are personal—for the first time, they are yours—and they are profound. They reflect and assure, they project and excite. And kids love them for it. They love them with their whole being. "   

Claire Legrand (Year of Shadows) at The Book Cellar

Jaleigh Johnson (Mark of the Dragonfly) at SFFWorld

Jennifer Nielsen (The Ascendance Trilogy) at The Haunting of Orchid Forsythia

The Dyerville Tours, by M.P. Kozlowsky, kicked off its tour this week--the full schedule is here, and  includes guest posts at Word Spelunking and The Book Smugglers

And Jonathan Auxier's After the Book Deal tour continues:
WEEK TWO: Your Book Launch
April 28 - “Can I have Your Autograph?” @ Haunted Orchid
April 29 –  “Cinderella at the Ball” @ The O.W.L.
May 1 – “Being Heard in the Crowd” @ The Misbehavin’ Librarian
May 2 - “The Loneliest Writer in the World” @ Shelf Employed


Other Good Stuff:

Akossiwa Ketoglo is hosting a Marvellous May Middle Grade Readathon

A list of Rick Riordan readalikes at alibrarymama

Lots on diversity this week, most notably the WeNeedDiverseBooks  campaign.

I wish I could offer a nice list of Diverse Middle Grade Speculative Fiction coming out this summer, but I can't--there's Infinity Ring Book 8: Eternity, by Matt de la Peña, and there's Spirit Animals Book 4: Fire and Ice, by Shannon Hale and that's all I can think of.  ARE THERE ANY MORE? Please tell me there are more. 

The Diversity Issue of SLG is up--click through for lots of good stuff, and heres a list of one ten-year-old's recommendations of fantasy and science fiction with diverse characters at Charlotte's Library

I am thinking I might be going to The Maine Comics Arts Festival on May 18th in Portland--when I told the boys that Ben Hatke and Kazu Kibuishi will be there they expressed fanchild interest, which I think should be encouraged.  Not that I myself have any interest in fangirling Ben Hatke (sarcasm font).

And speaking of comics, since yesterday was Free Comics Day, I offer (humbly) another episode in my own *exciting* series about the adventures of two Castaway Blobs, hastily drawn in the last five minutes because planning ahead is hard.

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Today is the third day of the WeNeedDiverseBooks campaign, and it is the Day of Action, which is to say, the day of buying books, and asking our libraries to buy books, and even just checking out lots of diverse books from our libraries, to show they are wanted.   So I set of to my local bookstore to find a middle grade book with diversity in it that I didn't already have, preferably one that showed a kid of color on the cover which wasn't about the Civil War (because I've never really wanted to read about the Civil War). 

Upon arriving at Barnes and Nobel, I was not overwhelmed by the choices available to me, because one book is not a choice.  But at least there was one for me to buy!  And happily, Eddie Red Undercover: Mystery on Museum Mile, by Marcia Wells, illustrated by Marcos Calo, was a great book!  One that I have no regrets about whatsoever!  One that I wouldn't have picked up if it hadn't been for the campaign! (one that is making me use to many exclamation marks).

In any event. 

Edmund is an African American kid in New York city with a photographic memory.   When his talents come to the attention of the NYPD, they enlist him to help crack a case involving a ring of art thieves...and promise that if he can help solve it, they'll pay the tuition at his private school.   Since his librarian dad just got laid off (side note:  African American father, very present in son's life, who is a librarian--yay!, library lay-offs, not yay), the tuition offer is so very sweet it can't be turned down (not that Edmund wants it turned down!).  And so Edmund starts staking out the art galleries of New York...and finds himself repeatedly squelched by the officer assigned to shepherd him through the detective work.

Fortunately Edmund has a buddy, Jonah, whose ADHD and OCD nature lends itself beautifully to the restless, obsessive compiling of data and searching for patterns.  And the two of them, now maverick operators with no NYPD support, close in on the art thieves just as they are about to carry out their next crime...

This was an immensely fun book--I loved Edmund's voice and his self-deprecating humor, and I bet I was grinning as I read.   I loved the relationship between his parents, and appreciated their realistic concerns for his safety.  I can't really speak to the logic of the puzzle at the heart of the book, because I am a bad reader of puzzle books (I'm more interested in character than clues), but it all seemed to make a certain amount of (admittedly improbable) sense. 

If you have a kid around who's ten or so who loves a good urban-kid-solving-mystery book, I pretty much can't recommend this more enthusiastically (although since I don't read this genre much, I don't have a solid basis for comparison).

If you want a book that shows an urban African American family with parents who are loving, well educated, and until recently able to afford an expense private school; a book in which race is something that comes up naturally in the protagonist's thoughts and conversations without being an issue driving the story, and if you want a book that shows the black kid right there on the cover being the hero (in the book he's more organized and never lets his pictures fall like that)--  this, I can say without any doubts at all, is a great book for you!

It is also the only book I have ever read in which the hero puts on his mom's Beyoncé wig from a costume party as the finishing touch to his disguise as a girl scout.

"I pin the hair back with one of my mom's hairclips.  Not bad, I think, turning to the side and checking out my new look.  I am innocent.  A sweet, geeky girl, perfect to let into your house and catalog your most expensive possessions.

I open the door.  Jonah stands there, eyes bulging out.  A strange noise gurgles in his throat.  Clutching his pants, he turns on his heel and sprints down the hallway.  I hear the bathroom door slam, followed by peals of laughter.  He better not have peed on the floor mid run."  (p. 200)

So I'm glad I bought it.  And here's another review, at Ms. Yingling Reads.

(Just for the record, today I also bought Boys of Blur, by N.D. Wilson, but that I had to order). 

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Continuing the Fun with Diverse Books, here's a quick list of great books with multicultural characters to offer your ten-year-old reader of fantasy, as selected by my own dear child.

Astronaut Academy Zero Gravity (2011), and  Astronaut Academy Re-Entry (2013), by Dave Roman, are wonderfully imaginative graphic novels, arguably more sci fi than fantasy.  There's a diverse cast of characters, many of whom are deeply loveable.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin (2009)  I have yet to meet a kid (even my older very picky reader!) who didn't enjoy this lovely story set in a fantasy China.  Both the illustrations and the writing are lovely! 

Jinx (2013) and Jinx's Magic (2014), by Sage Blackwood, is one of those blink-and-you'll-miss-it examples of diversity--the title character has brown skin, and it is mentioned in passing.   (I think we need lots of books in which people just happen to be all sorts of people, that can't be Labeled particular things, because of course readers are all sorts of people themselves).  It's one of my son's favorite series.

Likewise, it's mentioned in passing that the hero of  The Menagerie (2013), and Dragon on Trial (2014) by Tui T. Sutherland and Kari Sutherland, is African American.   Any reader who loves magical creatures should check out this series! 

My Neighbor Totoro (the novel), by Tsugiko Kubo (2013)-- I myself love this book tons.  It's very faithful to movie--all the gentle, sweet magic and family love is there in full force.

And finally, my son wants to make sure I include the Spirit Animal series (the first of which is Wild Born by Brandon Mull (2013), staring a group of kids that includes a girl from a fantasy China and one from a fantasy Africa, and they are shown beatufully, though not very large, on the covers (of books 1 and 3, respectively):






















And even more finally, I just want to sneak in a mention of Dragonbreath, Book 2: Attack of the Ninja Frogs, by Ursula Vernon, because even though the main character, Suki, is a salamander, she is a really really cool salamander from Japan.



My ten-year-old will be an eleven-year-old next Wednesday...and for tomorrow's challenge of putting our money where our mouths (or fingers, since we're typing) are, I am walking up the hill to the closest bookstore (B. and N.) to buy a multicultural fantasy book or two for him because I am sure there will be lots to choose from ha ha and if that fails I will have to buy something on-line.  I say "ha ha" because every anniversary of my decision to look for multicultural books I go to the bookstore and last year I managed to happily buy The Summer Prince but it is not as though there are scads of mg sff books that we don't already have with kids of color on the covers....

But in any event,  if B. and N. has a copy of Nightingale's Nest, by Nikki Loftin, I will buy a copy of that because I think its publisher, Razorbill, should be rewarded to the gills for this cover, in particular because no particular ethnicity was specified for the character by the text.



Here are the details for tomorrow from the We Need Diverse Books website:

"On May 3^rd, 2pm (EST), the third portion of our campaign will begin. There will be a Diversify Your Shelves initiative to encourage people to put their money where their mouth is and buy diverse books and take photos of them. Diversify Your Shelves is all about actively seeking out diverse literature in bookstores and libraries, and there will be some fantastic giveaways for people who participate in the campaign! More details to come!"

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Mostly when I blog about diverse science and fiction and fantasy for kids, the books are about characters who don't happen to be white, because other diversities (LGBT protagonists, and kids with disabilities that aren't magically cured being somewhat thin on the ground in speculative fiction books for kids and younger teens).   So just for kicks, here are my favorite spec fic books that including those diversities.

The first book I ever read (I think I was 15) in which the hero was in a loving, committed relationship with another man was The Door Into Fire, by Diane Duane, and I pretty much read this fantasy epic to pieces.  Herewiss is a magic user, his loved, Freelorn, is the exiled heir to a kingdom, and there is just tons of great fantasy world build and sexy times of all sorts.  I myself thought Freelorn was kind of wet (I think I just took against the name right from the beginning), and I was rooting for Herewiss' relationship with a really wonderful fire elemental being (who sometimes took male form, sometimes female, for the sexy good times)....because really a self-confident but poignantly vulnerable shape shifting elemental love interest is more interesting. The other two books in the series that were published (Door into Shadow, and The Door Into Sunset, are fine too, but not quite as preconception-of-sexuality shifting as this one was!

And at the same time, I was reading to pieces many of Marion Zimmer Bradely's Darkover books.  Thendara House, in which two women from different patriarchal societies (one is from Earth and one from Darkover) come to love each other, was a particular favorite, and can be read a stand-alone just fine.  I think I liked this one because I've always enjoyed reading about close communities of women--there's often a comfortable safeness to this sort of book, that in no way precludes emotional and external tensions and adventures, and I also love to read about struggles to navigate social norms in alien cultures.





My favorite spec fic protagonist with a disability (a damaged leg that causes him considerable pain) is Alan, from Sarah Reese Breennan's Demon's Lexicon series because I love him and he is wonderful and he is kind and smart and loves books and I love him.  And the books in which he appears are pretty darn good too.

My second favorite spec fic protagonist with a disability is Eugenides from Megan Whalen Turner's Queen's Thief series, who has only one hand.  He is awesome, and the books are awesome (especially The King of Attolia).   I am putting him after Alan because he is so awesome I can't even imagine crushing on him from afar in real life (perhaps in part because the relationship that he's actually in is so perfectly tight that there's no room for strangers to crush on him much).


For cultural and ethnic diversity reimagined in speculative fiction, Ursula le Guin is my go-to author.  Always Coming Home, is an novella set in the future that's situated within an anthropological framework based on Le Guin's extensive knowledge of Native North America.  It's taken me some years to realize how much I appreciate it, but after reliving it countless times while weeding the garden (a benchmark by which I measure books is how clearly and how often my mind offers them back to me again while weeding), I've realized that I truly love it. 

And the other Le Guin I must include is Four Ways to Forgiveness, four stories set on a planet and its moons where dark skinned people enslaved pale skinned people.  In order for this world to become part of the galactic community, the inequities of this culture must be resolved, and it's a difficult and painful process.   The characters in these stories are some of Le Guin's most memorable, which is saying  a lot.   And I'm also fond of this one for personal reasons--when I first met my husband, it had just come out, and both of us had it on our respective nightstands.

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The We Need Diverse Books Campaign is off and running!  Today folks are sharing there reasons why, and here is my younger son with his own sign--"We need diverse kid's books because it's easy for me to find kids like me in books but it's not easy for my friends!"

I've been trying to blog about books with diversity for the past five years (here's the post in which I get started), hunting out fantasy and sci fi books for kids in which the protagonists are kids who don't default to white. I want my boys to take it for granted that any kid, from any part of the world, can be the hero or heroine of a story. I've kept a list of the multicultural books I've reviewed here, and I've just started a new blog, Diversity in Science Fiction and Fantasy for Kids and Teens, where I'm posting them all in one place, to make them easier to find.  (I'd hoped to have more of reviews up there by today, but I found too many typos to make it go as quickly as I'd hoped!)

The We Need Diverse Books campaing continues tomorrow and the next day.  From the site:

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I read The Dyerville Tales (Walden Pond Press, middle grade, April 2014) avidly, with interest and enjoyment (though not true love), and usually when this happens it's easy for me to prattle on about the book's pleasing qualities.  But I find myself somewhat stuck as I try to write about this one, because I'm not entirely sure I can define why I enjoyed reading it, nor am I entirely sure I could successfully pick the young readers who would love it (though I'm sure they exist).

Vince Elgin has lived in an orphanage ever since the terrible fire that destroyed his home.  He knows it killed his mother, but nothing of his father was ever found....leaving Vince with horrible, desperately comforting, faith that his father will someday come back for him.   He tells the story of the fire over and over again to the other orphans, with its ending he has to keep believing--the arrival of the fiery dragon, and his father's disappearance in pursuit of it.  When word arrives at the orphanage that Vince's paternal grandfather has died, Vince knows he must go to Dyerville for the funeral--surely his father will be there.   And so he absconds from the orphanage, with little in the way of a plan, but with lots of hope.

He has something else as well.  The friend of Vince's grandfather who sent the death notice sent something else as well--a book in which he'd recorded all the grandfather's stories.   And as Vince makes his way through the cold winter to Dyerville, meeting friends and foes along the way, he reads these stories to himself and to others.   The fantastical journey described therein can't possibly be true, what with the evil witch, the blinded giant, the enchanted beasts, and the magical book.  But Vince has been practicing his belief in the impossible as hard as ever he can, and so he takes from his grandfather's story an answer, of a magical sort, that will finally give him peace.

The Dyerville Tales is two stories--the mundane world of Vince's journey, and the fantasy journey of his grandfather.  Both are somewhat episodic--Vince's journey in the real world less so--which I was perfectly comfortable with during the reading.  But I think that my reservation about the book comes from a sense that the thematic links aren't quite strong enough to ever make the two strands of stories, and even the stories within those strands, work together to make a coherent whole.  

And I was left with doubt about Vince's grandfather, as opposed to finding him and his life convincing emotionally--he must have been a real person, because there Vince is, but his life as told in the fantastically stories can't have been all there was to him, and we don't quite get to see any of that "real" person in our "real" world.  

I think, having now writing this, that the young reader I'd give this to would have to be one who loved fairy tales, who isn't the sort to come back to a parent after reading and say "but...but...."  A trusting sort of child, who doesn't have to have things make Sense.  Which, at this point in my life, isn't exactly me.

Here's another review, with fewer reservations, at Random Musings of a Bibliophile.

Disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

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At first glance, In the Keep of Time, by Margaret J. Anderson (1977) seems like a standard time travel story--four siblings, unwillingly spending the summer with a great aunt in the Scottish boarderlands, explore the ruined castle nearby.  Their aunt is its chatelaine, and has given them the key to the tower...and when they turn it (after it starts glowing, the way magic keys do), they travel back in time to the 15th century.   But soon a twist appears--the youngest child, Olivia, has no memory of her contemporary self.  Instead, she is Mae, grand-daughter of the castle's lord, with a family who loves her, and absolutely no inclination to trust her three siblings. 

And to make things even more exciting, the castle is besieged by an English army, and its own fighting men are away on a cattle raid.  Andrew, with Mae as his guide, is sent to warn them  (exciting adventure in the past bit happens, including a battle between James II of Scotland and the English).  

But for me, things really picked up when the three older kids drag Mae/Olivia back into the present with them.  They had expected her to become Olivia once more, but to their consternation, she remains Mae.  Child of the middle-ages that she now is, she is terrified and wonder struck in turn by the marvels of the present.   And her siblings, seeing no other recourse, desperately work to make Mae into a child of the 20th century who their parents might not realize is someone who misses her "real" mother back in the past....In the process, the siblings come to appreciate each other more (which was something their parents were hoping to accomplish by sending them off together for the summer).

Then the key glows again...and the kids head back to the keep.  Once more they travel through time, but now they find themselves several centuries in the future, and this might be the earliest example in a children's book of a future that imagines the consequences of sea-level rise from global warming caused by over-reliance on technology.   The only inhabitant of the keep in this time period is an old, mysterious woman....who is able (off-stage) to return Olivia to herself (at least, enough so that she isn't Mae anymore....).

This book is the sort to knock the socks off the nine or ten year old who's never read a time travel book, the sort of book they might well remember for life.    It's one that is best read as young as possible, though...I found it a pleasant read, but certainly it was not as emotionally powerful as it would have been to a younger me, whose relationships with siblings and parents were of primary importance. 

I had read Margaret J. Anderson's Searching for Shona, but had not realized she'd written time travel books, two of which appear to be connected to this one.   I'll be looking out for them!

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If The King of Attolia, by Megan Whalen Turner, met the City Watch books of Discworld and Bitterblue, by Kristin Cashore, the resulting book might remind one of The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison (Tor Books, April 1, 2014).  Basically, it's about a decent young man (who reminded me of Sam from Discworld, because both have compassion that transcends social boundaries), thrust into a world of dysfunctional corruption and political intrigue, who is lonely, and trapped by power, who has to learn really really quickly who he can trust and how to get things done....

Plot Summary:

Maia never expected to be Emperor--his father, ruler of the Elflands, had other sons much more pleasing to him then the despised child of a despised goblin wife.   And so, after the death of his mother when he was eight, Maia lived far from the imperial court, abused both physically and mentally by a bitter, drunken guardian.

Then the Emperor's airship explodes--and Maia is the only son left.  Half-goblin though he is, he becomes the Emperor, and all unprepared he's forced into a world of daunting etiquette, court intrigue, power struggles, corruption, and treason.   Still a teenager, innocent in many ways, Maia is at first at sea in the swirling morass of the court, and he struggles to shake the viciously critical voice of his abuser from his head.  But as Maia grows in confidence and power, he must, for the sake of his own sanity, cling to the core of his self--and it is his compassion and basic decency that bring the greatest ripples of change to his empire.

The Fantasy Elements

The fantasy elements are pretty straightforward.  The world is at a nascent industrial revolution stage(airships and mechanical are being build).  There's some "magic," most obviously in the ability that some individuals have to communicate with the dead. 

But of course the main fantasy element is that the people of the world are elves and goblins, and both have ears that convey body language (this disconcerted me right to the end).  The elves and the goblins differ from each other in appearance (the goblins have dark skin and red eyes, and are more robust, the elves white skin and blue/green eyes) and in culture, but they intermarry, and there's a lot of that on the boarder between the two realms.    Maia's mother was despised by the emperor not because she was the dark-skinned daughter of the Barizhan goblin king, but because he had dearly loved his previous wife, who died in childbirth.  That being said, Maia's abusive guardian did not spare him racial taunts.   

Issues of race and identity

I'm always a tad  leery of books where the characters are "elf" or "goblins," words so loaded with preconceptions.   And I make a habit of asking "Is it really necessary for these characters to be "elves/goblins?"  In this case, it's not actually crucial; this could have been an alternate Europe/Africa world, with human people who had different skin tones. But I appreciated how the choice to make the characters "fantasy others" allowed Addison to come at issues of race and identity from a different direction.  Fantasy such as this allows the familiar to be remigned afresh and strange, which, done well, is thought-provoking. 

In any event, Maia is a dark-skinned person in a court where everyone else in power is light skinned, and he'd keenly aware of it.   And it's not just mentioned once--his self-consciousness about his physical appearance, his observations of others, a large part of his sense of self,  are shaped by this fact and it keeps coming up in his mind.   Here's an example, when Maia is at a reception hosted by the Barizhan ambassador:

"It was the first time in his life Maia had been surrounded by people who were like him instead of only snow-white elves with their pale eyes, and he missed several names in the effort not to faint or hyperventilate or burst into tears." (page 195)

So in a nutshell, the issue of race pervades the story, and it's pretty thought-provoking. 

(Here's what I'd like to see someday--beautiful dark-skinned elves and short, stocky white goblins.  Because if your using fantasy to confront racism, why not go all the way.  Except then the main character would be white, so it wouldn't be confronting racism in the same way.  And without the negative-ness of "goblin" a lot of who Maia is in relation to the elves would be lost....)

This is also the only fantasy book I can think of in which a young male character is traumatized by an occasion when he was almost very horribly raped.   It is also a book in which there are characters who are gay, and characters who might well be gay (or not).  Sometimes in some cases this leads to complications.  Heterosexuality is the norm, but it's nice to see some diversity.  The role of women in a patriarchal society is also addressed, and very nicely too.  Maia, himself oppressed and denied an education, is sympathetic to the women he meets who want more than marriage and children.

A specific criticism (or, how my personal reading experience could have been better)

It is a very complicated world that Katherine Addison has created here, not so much in terms of the big picture, but because there is a very large cast of characters, many of whom are related to each/plotting against each other/with complicated backstories.   And her world comes with complicated naming conventions--perfectly believable, but rather hard to pick up quickly.   Fast readers like me, who are bad at names in general, will be confused.   I wish the explanatory note and the index had been put at the beginning instead of at the end, and I wish Addison had not relied on names as identifiers, but put in helpful phrases like "his father's aunt" or "the woman he would marry." 

The book would have been a more pleasantly immersive experience if I hadn't been reading slowly because of not being at all sure who people were.

(In fairness, the confusion occasioned by naming conventions worked beautifully to make me empathize with Maia, who was experiencing his own confusions right along with me, so as a rhetorical device I can't really fault it.)

And finally, my Final Thought:

I liked it a lot.  I don't have the urge to turn around right this sec and re-read it, but I can imagine I will want to in the future.   I imagine I might enjoy it more a second time, knowing who everyone is.

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Welcome to the last middle grade sci fi/fantasy round-up of April, a month in which I reviewed fewer mg sff books than I have for years, and I am really glad I have nothing to do other than go to work (hopefully without calls from the medical examiner's office this month; even deer bones can suck up time) and clean/repair the house/children (can we fix the leak ourselves, or will it require costly repairs?  Will my ten year old let me cut his hair?) and do an unending amount of yard work and run the library booksale in the next month. and probably other things, like maybe BEA, and so I am sure I will have hours and hours of time in which to read and review.

In any event, I didn't have time to search as hard as I might have for posts this week, so please let me know if missed your post this week!

The Reviews:

Boys of Blur, by N.D. Wilson, at Views From the Tesseract

Constable and Toop, by Gareth P. Jones, at Sonderbooks

The Curse of the Thrax (Book 1 of the Bloodsword Trilogy) by Mark Murphy, at thebookshelfgargoyle

Dragon on Trial (The Menagerie, Book 2), by  Tui T. Sutherland and Kari Sutherland, at Ms. Yingling Reads

The False Prince, by Jennifer Nielsen, at Guys Lit Wire

Flora and Ulysses, by Kate DiCamillo, at Rcubed's Reads and Reviews

The Foundry's Edge (The Books of Ore, Book 1), by Cam Baity and Benny Zelkowicz, at Librarian of Snark

The Ghosts of Trupelo Landing, by Sheila Turnage, at Reads for Keeps

The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two, by Catherynne M. Valente, at Speculating on Spec Fic

The Gliter Trap, by Barbara Brauner and James Iver Mattson, at Wandering Librarians

Gregor the Overlander, by Suzanne Collins, at SW Lothian

Heir Apparent, by Vivian Vande Velde, at Leaf's Reviews

Horizon, by Jenn Reese, at On Starships and Dragonwings

How to Catch a Bogle, by Catherine Jinks, at School Library Journal (audiobook review)

Mike Stellar: Nerves of Steel by K. A. Holt, at Original Content

The Nightshade Chronicles Books 2 and 3 (The White Assassin and Lords of Trillium), by Hilary Wagner, at Log Cabin Library

The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand, by Jen Swann Downey, at The Book Monsters, Charlotte's Library, and Word Spelunking (with interview)

Rose and the Lost Princess, by Holly Webb, at The Emerald City Book Review (with giveaway)
The Search for WondLa, by Tony DiTerlizzi, at The Overstuffed Bookcase

The Song of the Quarkbeast, by Jasper Fforde, at Geranium Cat's Bookshelf

Sky Raiders, by Brandon Mull, at Fantasy Literature and The Write Path

Switched at Birthday, by Natalie Standiford, at Not Acting My Age

Unforseen, by Ridley Pearson, at Manga Maniac Café

Wednesdays in the Tower, by Jessica Day George, at Tales of the Marvelous

The Wells Bequest, by Polly Shulman, at Time Travel Times Two

A World Without Princes, by Soman Chainani, at AP Book Club

Two at Supernatural Snark--Bite Size Magic, by Kathryn Littlewood, and The Finisher, by David Baldacci

Two by Diana Wynne Jones at The Book Smugglers-- Homeward Bounders, and Black Maria

Authors and Interviews

Maureen Doyle McQuerry (Beyond the Door) on Why Kids (and Parents!) Need Myths, at Working Mother

Diane K. Salerni (The Eighth Day) -- Heroes and Villains #3: The Evolution of an Antagonist, at Project Mayhem, and also interviewed at Project Mayhem

Jonathan Auxier (The Night Gardener) is on tour, discussing what happens "After the Book Deal." You can find all the stops at his site.

Soman Chainani (A World Without Princes) at A Backward Story


Other Good Stuff

At Tor, you can browse a selection of the best Clone Trooper action figure pictures ever, from artist ZahirBatin

A Tuesday Ten of environmental spec fic for kids at Views from the Tesseract

Shannon Hale talks about Altered Perceptions, an anthology in which she has a story written to support Robison Wells, beset by the financial difficulties that have come with his struggle against mental illness.

Some folks have organized a call for action regarding the lack of diversity, and the lack of attention paid to diversity, in children's book publishing.  The first three days of May has been set as a time for readers and reviews to raise their voices to make a difference.  More detailed information can be found here at weneeddiversebooks

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For my 2,500th post (!)  I have the pleasure welcoming Kate Milford, sharing her adventures in self-publishing.   Her latest venture, Bluecrowne (Arcana Project #2) takes place in and around the world her traditionally-published novels The Boneshaker and The Broken Lands (which I loved; here's my review), and the forthcoming Greenglass House (Clarion, August 26, 2014, and I can't wait!) and The Left-Handed Fate (Holt, 2015--this is the first I've heard of this one!  Exciting!).  

Kate is self-publishing Bluecrowne with the help of a Kickstarter campaign, which runs through tomorrow, April 25th.  Here's the description over at Kickstarter:  "Bluecrowne is a work of moderately frightening historical fantasy rooted in folklore. In it you'll meet villainous itinerant peddlers, young fireworks prodigies, privateers, and even the odd immortal or two. You'll learn why ship's biscuit is awesome, especially if it's stale (spoiler alert: WEEVILS). You'll learn the properties of cald-fire and lyke-fire, and the Chinese term for red massicot, just in case you ever need to know."

It sounds great.  And now, here's Kate, explaining more about it, with illustrations by some of the young artists involved in the project.

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The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand, by Jen Swann Downey (Sourcebooks Jaberwocky, April 2014, middle grade) is a zesty romp of a read that I thoroughly enjoyed; really truly thoroughly enjoyed.  Stripped to its barest bones, the plot might seem an old chestnut, but here the old bones are made fresh and new.  To wit:

Old Bone 1:  There is a secret society of time travellers trying to set history "right" and a bad society working against them.

But these time travellers are librarians (aka Lybrarians)!  Who combine mad shelving skills with mad sword fighting skills!  And who live in Petrarch's library where it's all a lovely geek and combat fest for both the residents and the reader, a place where books and scrolls are combined with swords and axes, and beautiful peaceful outdoor places and architecture of many times,  and tasty snacks (which appear when magically "read" from books.  (Not everyone can read snacks into material things; some can, for instance, make extinct auroches materialize).

And the Lybrarians mission of setting things right is focused on the preservation of knowledge and valuable writings!  They head back in time on dangerous missions to save books!  

Viz the bad society--they remain on the periphery for most of the book, which was fine with me because there was enough internal tension without dragging Good vs Evil into it.  And after all, epic confrontations don't have to happen every day.

Old Bone 2: two kids from our time stumble into the secret society and find out they are special.  They make friends and enemies.  An alpha girl hates the girl main character.   The boy main character gets a crush on a pretty girl.

Well, yes, Dorrie and her older brother Marcus do fall into a Magical World, and they are kind of special.  They've opened a portal to our time, and are therefore the "keyhands" who can open it for others to travel through, and keyhands are a rather special type of librarian.

But no, Dorrie and Marcus aren't all that special, and the fact that they are keyhands actually irks many people rather a lot, and other people don't trust them, and they aren't particular ept at anything of particular value.  Dorrie, for instance, is a sword-fighter, but finds to her chagrin that the standards of 21st-century amature re-enactors are horribly low...

Despite their lack of obvious talents, Dorrie and Marcus get to make places for themselves at the library, grow up a bit, appreciate books more, and start acquiring useful fighting/stealth/ninja skills--which they have to put to the test at the end of the book when things get truly dicey.  (Dorrie gets lessons in sword fighting from Cyrano de Bergerac!)

Moving on to other lines of thought:

--The library, as seen in this book, is rather focused on European civilization (I hope gets broadened in subsequent books), but there are Lybrarians and apprentices from places besides Europe, including Dorrie's new best friend Ebba, whose parents are from Mali, and who almost (but not quite) gets enough page time to be a main character.

--Time travel qua time travel is the heart of the plot (people going back to deliberately change the past), but the lived experience of travelling into different times isn't important to this particular story (and it's time travel made easy with translation magic and wardrobe help).   That being said, the story does end with an emotional zing that's dependent on time travel....

Final thoughts:

The whole set up of the library is just FUN as all get out, and the story zips along just beautifully.   And though I kind of suspected a key plot twist, this in no way reduced my enjoyment.

Best of all in my mind (given the number of books that I have put aside in the past month) I was never once kicked out of the story because of the writing. Which means that either the plot was so fun I didn't notice infelicities, or the writing was very good, or, quite possibly, both.  I think this is my favorite middle grade fantasy of the year so far, and I look forward to more!

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Welcome to this week's round-up of middle grade fantasy and science fiction from around the blogs!  Please let me know if I missed your post.

The Reviews

Boys of Blur, by N.D. Wilson, at Fuse #8

The Bravest Princess, by E.D. Baker, at The Flashlight Reader

The Carpet People, by Terry Pratchett, at alibrarymama

Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Leaf's Reviews

Conrad's Fate, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Leaf's Reviews

Diego's Dragon, by Kevin Gerard, at Middle Grade Mafioso

The Dyerville Tales, by M.P. Kozlowsky, at Random Musings of a Bibliophile

Ever After High: The Storybook of Legends, by Shannon Hale, at Literary Omnivore

The Forbidden Library, by Django Wexler, at On Starships and Dragon Wings, Writer of Wrongs, and The Book Zone (For Boys)

Game of Clones, by M.E. Castle, at Ms. Yingling Reads

The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, by Christopher Healy, at Sharon the Librarian (audiobook review)

Key to Kashdune, by Claudia White, at A Woman's Wisdom

The Last of the Dragons and some others, by E. Nesbit, at Jean Little Library

The Lives of Christopher Chant, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Leaf's Reviews

Lost Children of the Far Islands, by Emily Raabe, at Charlotte's Library

The Merman and the Moon Forgotten, by Kevin McGill, at This Kid Reviews Books

The Ninja Librarians: The Accidental Keyhand, by Jen Swann Downey, at Fanboynation

Northwood, by Brian Falkner, at The Book Monsters

The Orphan of Awkward Falls, by Keith Graves, at Good Books and Good Wine

The Pinhoe Egg, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Leaf's Reviews and Tales of the Marvelous

The Riverman, by Aaron Starmer, at 100 Scope Notes

Rose and the Lost Princess, by Holly Webb, at Debz Bookshelf (giveaway)

The School for Good and Evil, by Soman Chainani, at Fairytale Fandom

The Shadow Throne, by Jennifer Nielsen, at Cracking the Cover and Becky's Book Reviews

The Shadowhand Covenent, by Brian Farrey, at Book Nut

Smasher, by Scott Bly, at Charlotte's Library

The Spindlers, by Lauren Oliver, at Supernatural Snark

Suitcase of Stars, by Pierdomenico Baccalario, at Librarian of Snark

The Twistrose Key, by Tone Almhiell,  at Log Cabin Library

Who Could That Be At This Hour? by Lemony Snicket, at Reading the End

Witch Week, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Leaf's Reviews

Wonder Light, by R.R. Russell, at Sharon the Librarian


Authors and Interviews

Erin Cohn (Spirit's Key) at OneFour KidLit

Soman Chainani (A World Without Princes) at The Children's Book Review and The Enchanted Inkpot

R.R. Russell (Wonder Light) at The Hiding Spot

Delia Sherman (The Freedom Maze) at Big Blue Marble Blog


Other Good Stuff

Conversations about diversity were popping up all over last week, such as this post on Race, Power, and Publishing

For fans of the Queen's Thief series-Megan Whalen Turner has agreed to a video interview; if you have any questions for her you can submit them here.

It's Fairy Tale Fortnight; you can join the fun at this link up post at A Backwards Story

The pictures are copyrighted, I assume, but click through to see Fantasy Fiction Made Real aka a 13 year old Mongolian girl and the golden eagle she hunts with.   (Me--I would launch my eagle, my eagle would take off, and I would fall backward off the rocks.  Sigh).

And finally, here's a happy Easter greeting from days of yore, which I like because it shows the sport of rabbit jumping might be older than we had thought....

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The Martian, by Andy Weir (Random House 2014), was delightfully gripping.  The basic premise--Mark Watney is an astronaut abandoned on Mars after his spacesuit is punctured by a rouge antennae during a storm.  His crewmates, in a desperate hurry to leave the planet before it's too late for them all, are sure he is dead.  But he's not.

And now he is stuck on Mars, alone.  The next manned mission won't arrive for four years; he has food for only a few months.  He has no way to communicate with Earth.   But Watney is nothing if not resourceful, and he refuses to give in....

What follows is a harrowing survival story, in which human ingenuity is pitted against an environment where the smallest mistake can become deadly.    Basically, it's a grown-up version of My Side of the Mountain on Mars, and I enjoyed it very much.

Mostly it's told in Watney's log entries (in which he records all the various technical jury-rigging and repurposing projects that fill his days--don't try these at home), but when he finally manages to communicate with Earth, we get to see how NASA desperately does what it can to rescue him, and how the whole planet becomes riveted by what's happening out on Mars.   A lot of what concerns Watney is fairly technical, and I confess I read lightly over his engineering endeavours.  But I was riveted by his potato farming adventures--Watney is a biologist, as well as an engineer, and the 12 potatoes that flew to Mars for Thanksgiving turn out to be life-savers (composting for the win!).

I was sad this nearish-future vision of the scientific world hadn't made many strides with regard to the inclusion of women as full fledged geeks- true, the commander of the original mission is female, but NASA command is still pretty much all male.  And there were two gratuitous bits of nerd culture slamming that I wish hadn't been there (Watley wonders why one crew member is a nerd when she is so beautiful, and the PR woman at NASA sneers at colleagues who reference the Council of Elrond, which she's never heard of).  But I guess it's believable; attitudes take a while to change.

There's some strong language (the first sentence, for instance, is "I'm pretty much f***ed"), but I'd be comfortable giving it to my own eight-grader because there's really no point in pretending he doesn't know the f word at this point.

Anyway, I pretty much read it in a single sitting, and recommend it enthusiastically to anyone who enjoys harrowing survival stories that are chock full of science--instructive as well as entertaining.  And of course it could conceivably described as "a testament to the indomitable will of the human spirit" etc. etc. which is, you know, not a bad thing in thing to be reading in these difficult times when one's own spirit might be daunted by all there is to do at home and work.  At least I don't have to combine hydrogen and oxygen in the kitchen in order to wash the dishes.

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Smasher, by Scott Bly (Blue Sky Press, March, 2014, middle grade)

The future is in jeopardy--a madman who has managed to combine incredible technology with the psychic energies of nature (the Hum) is about to enslave mankind by with an infections cocktail of computer code and manipulated DNA. In the 16th century, a boy named Charlie can manipulate the hum even more wonderfully than the madman in the future.  And Charlie's ability to solve puzzles has been honed to a razors edge by his grandfather, and his survival instincts have been honed to a razors edge by fear of bullies and inquisitors....

Travelling between the two times is a girl named Geneva, a robot with miraculous powers of her own.   She comes to get Charlie, and take him to the future, where the two will stand together as last hope for humanity.  (There's a dog too, a very nice indeed puppy with enhancements of her own....there's also an enhanced gorilla, which you don't see that often, but he plays a relatively minor role).

And there's plenty of action, as the bad guy and his minions try to hunt down Charlie and Geneva, and they try to escape while foiling.

It was an enjoyable read, and it's a very good introduction to that fine speculative fiction question of how human a robot can be.  I liked Geneva very much!  Charlie was fine too, but with a relatively straightforward, what you see is what you get, character.  Geneva comes with Mysteries and Questions. 

This is one I'm happy to recommend to kids of ten and eleven or so, moving into sci fi action books.  It offers a nice serving of age-appropriate violence, which is to say there are deaths, and torture, but not disturbingly graphic, and balanced by a lot of sewer-related discomfort.   (Even if a kid's read The Hunger Games  and Ender's Game already, I don't think there's any reason to hurry toward ever more violence.)  However, there is considerable cruelty toward animals, which the bad guy is manipulating in  his lab of evil--this could well cause distress!

The action is balanced by dashes of (not tremendously subtle) philosophy about good vs evil, and by the friendship between Geneva and Charlie, which was a pleasure to read about.  And I think the time travel element will appeal to that audience as well--there's a friendliness to a protagonist who's plunked, like the reader, into a strange and alien landscape where much is confusing at first.

That being said, I myself found the time slip element unsatisfactory.  There's not a lot of time spent in the 16th century, and were it not for the fact that we are told the year is 1542, there's really no way to know.   Likewise, I felt Charlie's easy acceptance of the future somewhat unconvincing.  (It's also hard for me not to care about details like names--as I know the name Charles hadn't made it across the English Channel yet....and how can a boy living in a remote mountain village have three tutors, unless he's the aristocracy, which he doesn't seem to be?).

I also wasn't quite satisfied with the back story--when I'm told right at the beginning of the book that the protagonist's harsh grandfather has blood on his hands, and is apparently a murderer, I expect this to be explained, if not resolved, clearly and with conviction, and (even though I read fast I don't think I missed anything) the details stayed pretty murky.

But I don't think my two issues are the sort that will affect the reading pleasure of the target audience, especially the target audience for fast-paced sci-fi excitement.  Especially recommended for the computer geek kid-coding plays a bit part in the story!

Here's the Kirkus review.

Disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

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Lost Children of the Far Islands, by Emily Raabe (Knopf, April 2014), is a middle grade fantasy that takes the magical creatures of the oceans around the British Isles and transplants them to the coastal waters of Maine.   It's the story of three siblings who find themselves visited one night by a mysterious messenger, and taken out to sea to the island far off the coast where their grandmother lives....where they find that they are shapeshifters, able to take seal form.  And they find (much more disturbingly!) that their destiny is to take part in a age old battle against the darkest creature of them all--a destroyer who wants to ravage the oceans until there is no life left.

I found it a gripping, fast read that I was able to enjoy even in the midst of a frenzied, stressful week, and I appreciated the fact that it stands alone just fine (there's one unanswered question, but it doesn't materially affect this particular story).  

When I read a book about children in our world facing off against ancient folkloric evil, I have a rubric (which I am putting into words for the first time here, so I might well be missing something obvious!) by which I judge it.  Here's how Lost Children of the Far Islands came out in my mind.

1.  Are the young protagonists distinct people, or simply child-shaped spaces?  The kids here are two almost 11-year-old twins, a girl (Gus) and a boy (Leo), and their little sister, Ila.  The story's told mostly from Gus's point of view, but the other two gets some page time as well.  Gus is a girl primary character of the sort whose gender is a non-issue-- if you want your random boy to read books with girls, this is one that won't present problems in that regard.

All three kids are all individuals, especially young Ila, who is tremendously vibrant (she can also shapeshift into fox form, and I have a fondness for young fox shifters).   There are tensions between the siblings that all of us who have siblings can relate to just fine.  The kids have interests and personality traits that set them apart which for the most part become clear organically in the story, as opposed to traits that appear blatantly pinned on the character by the authorial hand. 

2.  Is there a reason for these particular kids being the ones that have to help save the world?   I like to have a clear sense that only these particular characters are in the position to do what needs to be done, and I like it when "specialness" is balanced by a dash of reality.  Harry Potter is convincing as a hero because he has so much support; likewise Will Stanton from The Dark is Rising couldn't have done squat alone.    I get especially nervous when a prophecy is involved (as is the case here), not just because so many fictional prophecies are truly tortured verse (this one was unobjectionable), but because there's often not a satisfying reason why a particular character is the Destined Child of Prophecy.  I think destiny is a fine thing, and can be a good source of character tension, but sometimes I can't help but feel that prophecies are window dressings.  And if I'm not clear that there's a reason it's these particular kids by about a third of the way through the story, it's hard for me to care.

Lost Children of the Far Islands passes this test just fine. The kids aren't simply plunked down into the middle of Destiny...it sneaks up on them with a nicely growing sense of danger, and they have to discover secrets about their mother, and their ancient grandmother, before realizing what exactly they are part of.  Likewise, the catalyst for confrontation comes not from the playing out of predestined roles, but because something goes wrong--there is a betrayal--which is more satisfying, I think.

3.  Are the mythological elements made into something fresh and convincing?  Does the fantasy make sense?   I think in metaphors, and I'm finding myself thinking of this question in Christmasy terms--the single tree, made beautiful, as opposed to the sensory overwhelmingness of Christmas-tree land box stores, too shiny-full for any coherent story to emerge.   This test is also passed just fine--  Emily Raabe doesn't try to bring every single last bit of Celtic mythology into the story--she sticks pretty much to the mythological creatures, and they fill the story just fine.

4.  (This one might be just a matter of personal taste)  Is there a reason for the places that are important in the story to be those places, and are the places described in such a way as to make clear pictures in my mind?  My favorite part of this book was the time spent on the mysterious far island where the magical grandmother lives--it is a lovely island, with lost mundane treasures and a library holding a far from mundane book.   It's not at all clear to me why all the magical opposition of good and evil should have ended up off the coast of Maine, instead of home in the British Isles, but this didn't bother me enough to be an actual objection.

So in short, Lost Children of the Far Island is a fine story, though best, I think, for those that don't already have tons and tons of fantasy under their belts already.  It's one I'll offer to my ten year old, who has yet to meet any seal folk in his reading, but I don't think it's appeal goes far beyond that target audience, which isn't a criticism, just a reality.  I think that to be a book for grown-ups to truly love, there has to be something of the numinous--the sort of magical beauty that leave the reader stunned--and that's a very rare thing indeed, so much so that I don't even include it in my list of mental criteria.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publisher

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I myself have nothing to share in this week's round-up for the first time ever (it was a busy busy week), but happily I found lots of other posts.  Please let me know if I missed yours!)

The Reviews

The 13th Sign, by Kristin O'Donnell Tubb, at Lovin' los libros

Battle  of the Beasts, by Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini, at The Haunting of Orchid Forsythia

Blue Sea Burning (Chronicles of Egg Book 3), by Geoff Rodkey, at Kid Lit Reviews

The Boys of Blur, by N.D. Wilson, at Librarian of Snark, Books and Movies, and Pages Unbound

Chase Tinker and the House of Magic, by Malia Ann Haberman, at Blog of a Bookaholic

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time, by Frank Cottrell Boyce, at alibrarymama

Dark Days (Skulduggery Pleasant 4),  by Derek Landy, at Book Badger

Deadweather and Sunrise (Chronicles of Egg book 1), by Geoff Rodkey, at Books Beside My Bed

The Dragonlord's Heir, by Christina Kenway, at The Tale of an American Librarian

The Eighth Day, by Dianne K. Salerni, at Views From the Tesseract

Ever After High: The Storybook of Legends, by Shannon Hale, at mstamireads and Fantasy Literature

Faery Swap, by Susan Kaye Quinn, at This Kid Reviews Books

Flora and Ulysses, by Kate DiCamillo, at Youth Literature Reviews

The Forbidden Library, by Django Wexler, at The BiblioSanctum

The Islands of Chaldea, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Random Musings of a Bibliophile

Lost Children of the Far Islands, by Emily Raabe, at Librarian of Snark

The Mark of the Dragonfly, by Jayleigh Johnson, at My Precious and On Starships and Dragonwings

Mixed Magics, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Tales of the Marvelous

The Nethergrim, by Matthew Jobin, at Ms. Yingling Reads, The Social Potato, and The Midnight Garden

Nightingale's Nest, by Nikki Loftin, at Waking Brain Cells

North of Nowhere, by Liz Kessler, at The Book Monsters

Rose and the Lost Princess, by Holly Webb, at A Backwards Story, Sharon the Librarian, and Word Spelunking (all giveaways)

Summerkin, by Sarah Prineas, at The Book Monsters

Wildwood Imperium, by Colin Meloy, at Fangirl Chelle

Wonder Light: Unicorns of the Mist, by R.R. Russell, at Geo Librarian

A World Without Heroes, by Brandon Mull, at Log Cabin Library

Zombie Baseball Beatdown, by Paulo  Bacigalupi, at Kazumi Reads

Two by Ruth Chew at Becky's Book Reviews--Magic In the Park and The Trouble With Magic

Three at Ms. Yingling Reads--Aviary Wonders (fantasy?), In the Stone Circle, by Elizabeth Cody Kimmell, and Listening for Lucca, by Suzanne Lafleur

Authors and Interviews

"Living Up to Your Character" by Jennifer Swann Downey (Ninja Librarians) at Nerdy Book Club

Suzanne de Montigny (Shadow of the Unicorn) at Katie L. Carroll

Other Good Stuff

Project Mayhem's series on Heroes and Villains in Middle Grade Literature continues with editor and author Harrison Demchick talking about how villains are people too.

At The Book Zone (For Boys) thoughts on focusing on a specifically gendered audience, and a nice list of (mostly speculative fiction) books starring girls with appeal to boys.

Visit Views From the Tesseract for a sampler of poetry in stories

Yes, there is someone whose hobby is carving bananas; you can find more on the craft of Keisuke Yamada here (via Rachel Neumeier)

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Some weeks life is busy, and there just isn't time to read and write lots, and so the blogging is slow.  And it's been even slower for me because most of the books I have managed to finish recently didn't move me to write about them, mostly because of me not having the mental energy to figure out and express eloquently why they hadn't worked for me.

So last night I turned to a book from a series (Scholastic's Branches) that promises to build "reading confidence and stamina," both of which I feel I need right about now.

Moldylocks and the Three Beards, written and illustrated by Noah Z. Jones (Scholastic, published in paperback in Jan 2014, and in a hardcover library edition April 29) is the first book in a series--"Princess Pink and the Land of Fake-Believe."   My eyes rolled when I read the words "Princess Pink," but not so much so that I was unable to look at the cover more closely.  And lo, Princess Pink seemed pretty cool. 

So I tried it last night, and rather enjoyed it, and can happily recommend it.  If you are a young reader who enjoys the absurd. and who is looking for something fun and easy, this is what you get here.

Princess Pink is not a princess; after seven boys, her mother wanted a one, and so that's what she was named.  She hates pink.  She turned her pink fairy dress into a cowboy caveman outfit.   (Perhaps her hatred of pink, and her taste in dirty sneakers and bugs is a tad polarizing--does the cheesy pizza she enjoys really have to look so gross?  And one can enjoy the outdoors without one's shoes stinking.  But this is not a book that aims for subtly, so I shall let it pass).

And in any event, Princess Pink opens her fridge one night, and falls (literally) into a the Land of Fake-Believe, where she visits the home of three beards (not nice) in the company of a girl named Moldylocks.   The whole beard premise was rather effective, and I enjoyed it.

Recommended for those who don't mind negative portrayals of pink princess stuff.  

Not particularly recommended for those who don't like whimsical stories whose primary point is to make learning to read entertaining.  Also not recommended for those who loath spiders.  There are too many spiders for those readers to take.

Not really recommended to their adults for their own reading pleasure, although it was kind of exactly right for my tired brain last night...........and I might well find myself picking up Little Red Quaking Hood when it comes out in August.

Note:  Princess Pink's family looks to be African-American--pretty darn rare in easy-reader fantasy books!  (quick--name another girl character of color in an easy reader fantasy book.............those dots are me not being able to).

Disclaimer:  review copy received from the publisher

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Another week, another collection of links!  Let me know if I missed yours.

The Reviews

Aunt Maria, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Leaf's Reviews

Beyond the Door, by Maureen Doyle McQuerry, at SciFiChick

Boys of Blur, by N.D. Wilson, at Random Musings of a Bibliophile

The Brightest Night (Wings of Fire book 5), by Tui T. Sutherland, at Charlotte's Library

By the Grace of Todd, by Louise Galveston, at Ms. Yingling Reads

The Children of the King, by Sonya Hartnett, at Waking Brain Cells and Charlotte's Library

Dreamwood, by Heather Mackey, at Views From the Tesseract

Flora and Ulysses, by Kate DiCamillo, at Librarian of Snark and Ex Libris

Game World, by Chrisopher John Farley, at Ms. Yingling Reads

The Girl Who Cirumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, by Catherynne M. Valente, at Speculating on Spec Fic

Horizen, by Jenn Reese, at Random Musings of a Bibliophile

Hunt for the Hydra, by Jason Fry, at Ms. Yingling Reads

Lockwood & Co.: The Screaming Staircase, by Jonathan Stroud, at Guys Lit Wire

Luminescence, by Braden Bell, at The Write Path

The Magicians of Caprona, by Diana Wynne Jones, at Marvelous Tales

The Mark of the Dragonfly, by Jayleigh Johnson, at books4yourkids and The Hiding Spot

The Ninja Librarians: the Accidental Keyhand, by Jennifer Swann Downey, at Sharon the Librarian and The Reading Nook

Rose and the Lost Princess, by Holly Webb, at The Book Monsters, A Backwards Story, and Geo Librarian (all with giveaways)

The Seer of Shadows, by Avi, at Fantasy Literature

The Serpent's Ring, by H.B. Bolton, at Log Cabin Library

A Snicker of Magic, by Natalie Lloyd, at Akossiwa Ketoglo

The Song of the Quark Beast, by Jasper Fforde, at Claire M. Caterer

Tesla's Attic, by Neil Shusterman and Eric Elfman, at Booklady's Booknotes

The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp, by Kathi Appelt, at Bunbury in the Stacks (audiobook review)

West of the Moon, by Margi Preus, at Educating Alice

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" by Lemony Snicket, at Sonderbooks

 Wonder Light, by R.R. Russell, at The Book Monsters

Ms. Yingling celebrates the reissuing of two Ruth Chew books--The Trouble With Magic, and Magic in the Park.

Authors and Interivews

Maureen Doyle McQuerry (Beyond the Door) at Literary Rambles

Geoff Rodkey talkes about Blue Sea Burning, the final instalment of The Chronicles of Egg series, at Whatever

Jennifer Swann Downey (Ninja Librarians) at The Reading Nook (giveaway)

Marissa Burt (Storybound and Story's End) at From the Mixed Up Files (giveaway)

Other Good Stuff

At Views From the Tesseract, a Tuesday Ten of girls disguised as boys

Kathrine Langrish talks about the colours in fairy tales at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

The winners of the 2013 Aurealis Awards (recognizing Australian sci fi, fantasy, and horror) have been announced (click through for the full list):

Best Children's Book
The Four Seasons of Lucy McKenzie, by Kirsty Murray

Best Young Adult Short Fiction 
By Bone-light, by Juliet Marillier

Best Young Adult Novel (Tie)
These Broken Stars, by Amie Kaufman & Meagan Spooner
&
Fairytales for Wilde Girls, by Allyse Near
 

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