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The latest issue of the venerable SF Site has been posted, and it contains a review I wrote of Paul McAuley's 1995 novel Fairyland, a book I enjoyed quite a bit. General busy-ness has kept me from writing for SF Site for a while, and it's nice to be back. (Next up for them will probably be a review of Ursula LeGuin's recent YA trilogy, but I doubt I'll have time to get to it for a few months, alas.)

Here's a snippet from the review:

The effort to distinguish between "science fiction" and "fantasy" is a futile and exhausted one, but part of the fun of Fairyland lies in watching Paul McAuley take words common to the vocabulary of high fantasy stories -- "fairy," "fey," "trolls," etc. -- and employ them within the unambiguously science fictional setting of a nanotechnologized future of virtual realities and designer diseases. It’s a simple conceit, but not a jokey one, because the terms lend the novel depth, linking the forward momentum of the future world to the backward glance of legends and folktales. (It's particularly appropriate that Fairyland won the Clarke Award, since one of Sir Arthur's most famous statements was that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.") There's a metafictional effect, too, drawing our attention to the novel's genre play, daring us to impose our assumptions about what is possible and what is not, both in reality and in fiction.

It’s spring Down Under, and the gardeners of Melbourne are out in abundance, reminding me of the heartwarming account of a multicultural community garden, Paul Fleischman’s lovely Seedfolks.

Gina Biancarosa, friend and literacy expert, is a big fan of the Newbery Award-winning children’s author, and Seedfolks is her “absolute favorite” Fleischman book. “Just so well written, and even though it takes place in America, there are a number of immigrant characters in it.” She points out the Christian Science Monitor’s comment on Fleischman’s website, “The size of this slim volume belies the profound message of hope it contains.” Here’s an account of what Seedfolks inspired one young reader to do. Here’s an excerpt from Seedfolks and Fleischman’s story of how he came to write it.

Now for a few other books on community gardens… In Jorge Argueta’s bilingual text, Xochitl and the Flowers, Xochitl and her family, El Salvadorans new to San Francisco, turn a garbage heap behind their apartment into a nursery for plants. Here’s PaperTigers’ interview with author and illustrator Carl Angel. In Our Community Garden, by Barbara Pollak, also set in San Francisco, kids make a feast of burritos, stir-fry, and other ethnic specialties, using foods they’ve grown in their community garden. The Garden of Happiness, YA author Erika Tamar’s first picture book, is the story of a multicultural community garden in New York City.

Inspired? Right. For ideas on how to use Seedfolks in the classroom or how to start a school garden, click here and scroll down. Happy gardening!