After the Cybils ended, and I had the freedom to read whatever the heck I wanted, I went a little crazy with interlibrary loans, requesting about fifteen books pretty much at random from my long to-be-read list. Some of the books have been on it for over a year, and I've forgotten why I added them in the first place...

One rather pleasant surprise from this recent batch was The Amazing Story of Adolpuhs Tips, by Michael Morpurgo (Scholastic, 2005, middle grade, 140 pp).

In 1943, an eleven year-old girl named Lily lives in a seaside village in England. War has brought evacuees from the cities to her school, and American soldiers are filling the streets, but life for Lily and her beloved cat, Tips, goes on pretty much as normal.

Then her entire village is ordered to leave. It is going to become a training ground for the Americans preparing for D-Day. But Tips doesn't understand his old home is now forbidden ground, and Lily risks her life going back beyond the fences to try to find him...

An American soldier, the first black person she has ever met, promises to help her. Though they meet seldom, they become true friends. And years later, when both are old, their paths cross again.

It's a gentle book, the sort that, even though I sniffed a bit in places, is a comfort read--even though the war brings disruption and loss, friendship triumphs, and Tips is found. This is a book cat-loving girls who like stories of World War II England will love--my only complaint was that at 140 pages, it was too short.

The Roar, by Emma Clayten (Scholastic, 2009, upper middle grade on up, 481 pp)

In a hellish dystopia, where a mega-London lies half-drowned, in a world where all animals are dead and walls enclose the overcrowded warrens of humanity to keep them safe from the plauge, there lives an eleven year-old boy named Mica who refuses to believe his twin sister is dead.

He's right, and the reader knows it--she's the first person we meet, desperatly flying a stolen pod fighter homeward, trying to escape from a mysterious Them who have kept her imprisoned on a spaceship. But she doesn't make it all the way home, and Mica's life in the dampness and darkness of the lower classes remains unchanged.

Then one day a new and strangly sinister Program is announced, a program that will make the kids of London Fit and Happy. A large part of this is a new virtual reality video game, based on flying pod-fighters in combat. The game offers everything to children who have nothing--if they play the game well enough, they can win fabulous prizes. And despite his growing sense of danger, Mica knows in his heart that if he is a winner, he can find his sister again....But the games keep getting harder, and each round brings new challenges.

So in short, this is a survival game story, a story of clever children outwitting and outplaying their grown-up enemies, set in a post-environemntal-disaster dystopia.

Contrary to what the reader might expect from the referrence to spaceships early on, it's set pretty firmly on earth--a convincingly drawn mess of a place. Mica is a smart, interesting character. He's just as much in the dark as the reader, and Clayton does a fine job letting reader and character figure things out at the same pace. Because the book focus so tightly on Mica, he's the only one of the cast of diverse kids involved in the game who became real to me, but looking back on it, this is is in keeping with his rather self-focused state of mind throughout the book.

Clayton keeps the book moving briskly with fresh intrigue and complexity at each level of the game, and the unsolved mysteries made for gripping reader. But for me at least, the story fell apart a bit toward the end--the answers felt a bit anticlimactic--and so I was left a little disappointed.

But that is just me. I think many older middle grade kids, and teenagers as well, to say nothing of adults, might well find this gripping and enjoyable right to the end. Especially after reading glowing reviews such as this one at Pink Me and this one at The Book Blog.

Especially recommended for boys who love video games that involve blowing up space ships, who also care about the environment.

(review copy recieved from the publishers, for Cybils Award consideration)

I am bloggiesta-ing this weekend--joining in the fun organized by Natasha at Maw Books! Bloggiesta is a time to focus on making our Blogs the Best that they can Be.

I'm going to spend time this weekend writing reviews, sending links of reviews already written to publishers (I am so so bad at this), organizing books waiting to be read and reviewed, finishing non-review posts that have been lurking for months, and updating my side-bar links.

I have already done one useful thing: I gathered all the books I've gotten from publishers but haven't read yet (not including books from the Cybils) from the various flat surfaces around the house and put them all in neat piles on the dining room table. This works against my New Year's Resolution to promote Gracious Dinning, but you can't have everything.

And I've also signed up for Pam and Lee's Comment Challenge 2010--for the next 21 days, I'll be leaving five comments a day around and about...

I'll be using this post to keep track of my progress. To date:

1 review finished and posted. Have "temporarily misplaced" publisher's contact information, so cannot let them know. sigh.

Side bar of recent reviews updated. Am not sure just how interesting this list is to anyone, but I like to imagine that it gives the books I review a little bit more time in the sun...

In Matt Phalen's graphic novel for middle grade readers, The Storm in the Barn, the Storm is real. It is a magical creature of terrifying power, an angry being that has been gathering its strength by withholding the rain from the parched lands around it. A young boy, bullied by his peers and dismissed as worthless by his father, becomes a true hero when he confronts the Storm and forces it to bring rain to the Dust Bowl. It's a great fantasy.

The Storm in the Barn (Candlewick Press, 2009) has just won the 2010 Scott O'Dell Award for Historical Fiction, that honors books for children or young adults. It's the only winner, since the first award was given in 1984, that's a graphic novel, and the first that's a fantasy. As Betsy notes at Fuse #8, this opens up interesting questions- "How much fantasy is allowed in a given book? How much history should be present?" she asks.

So I have quickly scrolled through the long list of books in my mind that combine history and fantasy (lots of time travel books, quite a few magic in the past books, lots of alternate history books that I don't count because they aren't real history). I've decided that it is fairly easy to tell if the history is there to provide backdrop and setting (a lovely example of this sort of book is Bewitching Season, by Marissa Doyle (my review), or if the fantasy is there to provide the reader with a way to engage with the history, one way of making "history" into "story." Many time travel stories, like the one I reviewed most recently--A Different Day, a Different Destiny, by Annette Laing (my review), do this.

I think it's pretty clear that The Storm in the Barn fits into my later category quite nicely. I would love to see books exemplifying this type of history/fantasy mix, where the history is privileged, winning future Scott O'Dell awards!

My own all-time favorite examples of solid historical fiction that is also a fantasy are Mary Stewart's books about Merlin, a series that begins with The Crystal Cave.

Here are the new releases of fantasy and science fiction for children and teenagers from the beginning of January. Lots of good stuff!

For nine to twelve year olds:

AMAZING GREEK MYTHS OF WONDER AND BLUNDERS by Mike Townsend. "From Hercules’ snake assassin slippers to Arachne’s wicked weaver rap songs, these are the mythic monsters and Hellenic heroes that have captured Western culture for centuries—but a whole lot more fun. Each story showcases the wondrous and blunderful antics of gods and mortals in bright graphics that rival the super-heroic action of The Lightning Thief, burst with the knock-your socks- off humor of Jeff Kinney, and still remain unerringly faithful to the original myth."

CALAMITY JACK by Shannon & Dean Hale. "Jack likes to think of himself as a criminal mastermind…with an unfortunate amount of bad luck. A schemer, plotter, planner, trickster, swindler...maybe even thief? One fine day Jack picks a target a little more giant than the usual, and one little bean turns into a great big building-destroying beanstalk. With help from Rapunzel (and her trusty braids), a pixie from Jack’s past, and a man with inventions from the future, they just might out-swindle the evil giants and put his beloved city back in the hands of good people ....while catapulting themselves and readers into another fantastical adventure."

COPPER by Kazu Kibuishi. "Copper is curious, Fred is fearful. And together boy and dog are off on a series of adventures through marvelous worlds, powered by Copper's limitless enthusiasm and imagination. Each Copper and Fred story in this graphic novel collection is a complete vignette, filled with richly detailed settings and told with a wry sense of humor. These two enormously likable characters build ships and planes to travel to surprising destinations and have a knack for getting into all sorts of odd situations. Copper's good cheer always smoothes the way---and Fred can usually be won over if there's food involved."

DEAD GUY SPY: NATHAN ABERCROMBIE, ACCIDENTAL ZOMBIE by David Lubar
"Nathan Abercrombie is getting used to his rotten life as a half-dead zombie. The good thing is he doesn’t feel any pain. The bad thing is his body can’t heal, so he has to be really careful not to break anything. But that’s hard to do when his wrestling-obsessed gym teacher, Mr. Lomux, matches him up with Rodney the bully, who’s looking for any excuse to break his bones. Then one day, Nathan is approached by the secret organization B.U.M.—aka the Bureau of Useful Misadventures—which offers him a cure in exchange for his help. Nathan jumps at the chance to become the world’s first zombie spy, but soon discovers that B.U.M. isn’t quite what it seems. Can Nathan trust them?"

ERAK'S RANSOM: RANGER'S APPRENTICE by John Flanagan. "What does it mean to earn the Silver Oakleaf? So few men have done so. For Will, a mere boy, that symbol of honor has long felt out of reach. Now, in the wake of Araluen’s uneasy truce with the raiding Skandians comes word that the Skandian leader has been captured by a dangerous desert tribe. The Rangers are sent to free him. But the desert is l

It has been more than a month since my last Timeslip Tuesday post...yoicks. But I have several good ones lined up, so I have high hopes that it will become a regular feature again.

In view of the recent blogosphere discussion about kids of color in the books written today, I am rather pleased that the book that I had already planned to review today has, as one of the three main characters, an African-American boy from the 21st century who is a normal, everyday kid. Normal, that is, apart from the fact that he travels through time.

This week's time travel book is A Different Day, A Different Destiny, book 2 of the Snipesville Chronicles by Annette Laing (2009, Confusion Press, middle grade, 269pp). In the first book of the series (Don't Know Where, Don't Know When), Hannah and Alex Dias, and their friend Brandon Clark travelled back through time and space to WW II Britain (and Brandon went back even farther, to WW I...). Now the three children have been whisked up again in the time travelling machinations of the strange professor who took control of their lives last time. They are about to find out what 1851 was really like.

For Hannah, who finds herself toiling in a Scottish textile factory, it is brutal drudgery. For Alex, who finds himself the clerk of a slave-owning Southerner, life is more comfortable materially, but not at all so mentally. For Brandon, the experience is even stranger--as a black boy in Victorian England, he is something of a curiosity. He leaves his first employment in a northern coal mine to find work as an undertaker's boy (adding interest to funerals), and from there he becomes a servant to a titled lady, who brings him out to preach the evils of slavery to raise money for abolition.

Although the paths of the three children seem to have taken them far from each other (in rather complicated story-lines), they are fated to meet again. When they do, the three kids must change the course of history. It's a small change, but important nonetheless...

Annette Laing is herself a professor of history, and the 1851 she brings to her readers is beautifully researched and meticulously crafted. As far as "time travel as education" goes, her Snipesville Chronicles are impeccable. My only complaint is that this book is perhaps a tad too ambitious in the history side of things. My own mind was dizzied by the three points of view--hurrying from Georgia plantation to coal mine to textile factory and onward, each place with its own cast of local characters and dense background of history and culture. I had a sense of the book as more "vignettes of modern children in the past" then as an engrossing fictional narrative.

But when the paths of the three kids all bent toward the Crystal Palace in London (around page 200) the story truly began to work for me as a story--they ceased being characters in isolation, and became much more alive in my mind. And from then on, it was both fasc

The Ask and the Answer, sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go, by Patrick Ness, has just won the Costa Children's Book Award. (Since this is a UK award, the picture is of the UK edition).




Here is the shortlist, chosen by appointed judges (generally a trio of that include an author, a bookseller, and a journalist):

Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd
Troubadour by Mary Hoffman
The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
Guantanamo Boy by Anna Perera

I haven't read any of them....I've had a copy of The Ask and the Answer for ages and ages, but the Knife of Never Letting Go upset me so much that I haven't yet found the strength to read its sequel....

I have lots and lots of reviews to write, but two very special mugs came in the mail for me today, and I wanted to quickly post about them:

They were generously donated by artist Erin Swift to an on-line auction that helped kick start Tu Publishing, and I was the lucky high bidder! Thank you, Erin!

And thanks in advance to the folks at Tu Publishing, for promising us multi-cultural science fiction and fantasy books for children and young adults.

From their website: "We want to publish exciting, adventurous books that children of all backgrounds will be able to either see themselves in or find a window to another world—or both, because what fantasy book isn’t a window to another world?"

Yes please!

Welcome to this week's gathering of blog posts about middle-grade (ages 9-12) fantasy and science fiction books! I skipped last week, so there are a couple here from back then...Please let me know if I missed your post!

The most exciting Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy news is the Shortlist for the Cybils Awards. These seven books are all truly excellent (although I helped pick them, and so am a tad biased). Which do you like best? (more frivolously, which cover do you like best?)








Yesterday I went through the 98 books nominated to look for kids of color--here's what I found.

Here are the various reviews of mg sff books: