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Greetings, all you March Madness fans. Bill is out sick today, so we may have to wait a bit to tabulate the results for the first round of our Sweet 16 of Books. (I wonder if a Sith lord takes medicines or fights viruses with a light saber) In the meantime, I'll give you some book recommendations from THE ACCC, that is, ACCording to Carl. We live in North Carolina and are part of the mighty ACC (Atlantic Coast Conference), so I thought that our blog could go them one better and be THE ACCC. So here are some good books ACCording to Carl.
Actually the first books are a seres, the Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander. A lot of our regular readers are big fans of fantasy and I'm surprised that not many people have talked about them before. These books are really terrific and belong on this blog that points out terrific books. Each one has enough adventure, excitement, and humor to satisfy any reader. They are, in order:

The Book of Three--Young Taran, the orphan boy, is Assistant Pig-Keeper to the wizard Dallben, who is 397 years old. Life is boring as an Assistant Pig-Keeper, but it suddenly becomes exciting when Hen Wen, the oracular pig, escapes and she must be rescued before she's captured by the forces of Arawn, Lord of the Dead. This book has it all--adventure, magic, mysterious swords found in an underground barrow, the fearful Horned King, Eilonwy the tomboy princess who adventures with Taran, faithful Gurgi the whatever-he-is, and much more!

The Black Cauldron--Taran gets his chance to wear a sword and go on a daring raid into Annuvin, the realm of Arawn, and capture the Black Cauldron, which can create an army of the undead. He soon finds out that this is glorious adventure is not just fun and games but a real life and death confrontation with evil. Even better than the first one.


The Castle of Llyr--Since Eionwy is a princess, she has to sail away to the Isle of Mona to learn to act like one, even though she hates the idea. She falls under the spell of the evil enchantress Archen, however, and Taran and friends must rescue her. Or does Eilonwy want to be rescued? Wow, this one is good!



Taran Wanderer--The Assistant Pig-Keeper becomes obsessed with finding the truth about his birth and identity. He will know if he finds the magical Mirror of Llunet. Does he do it? And what else does he learn along the way? I can't say enough good things about this one!




The High King--The final confrontation between Arawn and the forces of good. This book won a Newberry Medal (sort of the Oscar for kids' books) as best book of its year, and, boy, did it deserve it!!!A great conclusion to an unbelievably good series. Don't miss them!




Hope to get results up soon. Just from looking at some of the paper ballots, we might have some upsets! Ought to be interesting!
Carl

I would really, really love to attend this one year. Until then, I'm making do with Whitney Matheson's excellent coverage at Pop Candy.