SHADOW OF THE RED MOON
WALTER DEAN MYERS (illus. Christopher Myers)
OUT OF PRINT (non-affiliate Amazon link)
from $1.35 in multiple editions
Rating: 4* of five
The Publisher Says: Master storyteller Walter Dean Myers' remarkable fantasy
If it had been up to Jon, he never would have left Crystal City. But the Fen children had finally broken through the city walls. And the Okalian way would survive only if some of the Okalians survived.
So Jon sets out into a strange new world. He's been told to find the Ancient Land, where Okalian civilization began. But he hasn't been told of the horrors he will have to face in the cold Wilderness in order to get there. Now he must face the fact that everything he's been taught might be a lie -- a lie he must face for everything to survive.
I DON'T KNOW HOW THIS PRETTY HARDCOVER GOT ONTO MY SHELF BUT IT'S GOING TO THE LITTLE FREE LIBRARY TODAY.
My Review: A deeply affecting and beautifully written post-apocalyptic tale of survival and discovering the will to thrive in spite of the complexities of growing out of your comfort zone. In the post-COVID years, stories of young people coming to terms with the failings and failures of the adult world, and learning to get on with their own adulthoods in an illusion-free space that enables them to act on their own principles, are invaluable. I hope you can find one of these sturdy kids to inspire with the gift of this read. There are really beautiful woodcuts throughout the text, that enhance the atmosphere the author is telling the story within.
Perfect for 12 and up readers.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE STARS AT OKTOBER BEND
GLENDA MILLARD
Candlewick Press
$16.99 hardcover, available now
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: i am the girl manny loves. the girl who writes our story in the book of flying. i am alice.
Alice is fifteen, with hair as red as fire and skin as pale as bone. Something inside Alice is broken: she remembers words, but struggles to speak them. Still, Alice knows that words are for sharing, so she pins them to posters in tucked-away places: railway waiting rooms, fish-and-chips shops, quiet corners. Manny is sixteen, with a scar from shoulder to elbow. Something inside Manny is broken, too: he once was a child soldier, forced to do terrible, violent things. But in a new land with people who care for him, Manny explores the small town on foot. And in his pocket, he carries a poem he scooped up, a poem whose words he knows by heart. The relationship between Alice and Manny will be the beginning of love and healing. And for these two young souls, perhaps, that will be good enough.
Beautiful, lyrical prose, told in two voices, lifts up a poignant story of two traumatized teens who find each other in a small riverside town.
I RECEIVED AN ARC FROM THE PUBLISHER. THANK YOU.
My Review: The end of 2015 was a time that I, personally, was healing from some awful emotional and psychic wounds. At that moment, I wasn't really up to reading adult-level books. I thought that, since they're aimed at people of (say) twelve or thirteen, YA books would be about perfect for me. Not too rough, not too simplistic.
You idiot, I want to find my younger, more naïve self and shout at him.
This is a charming story of young love, of the viperous depredations of haters inculcated in a sense of their own superiority and imperviousness to blame, of the astounding prices we exact from those too weak to resist. They're all done up in ribbons of florid language in this book, and the use of typographical tomfoolery...Alice's narration is without capitals, while Manny's is in a blocky sans-serif type and in very English-as-a-second-language words...is pervasive. In fact it sort of defines the ethos and the aesthetic of the story. Which explains the missing stars.
Yes, it will appeal to the target audience. No, it did nothing but detract from the touching story being told. The stars stay gone.
Small-town stardom and the general veneration in US culture for sports stars at all levels is under very effective attack in this story. Manny is a child soldier being gentled into mainstream society by some very good souls. His father figure, Bull, is a former high-school sports phenom. It's natural that Manny would map his own efforts onto Bull's pattern. That he is good at it is the source of his worst, most believable crisis.
Alice is, it's fair to say, a social outcast from a family of them. She's neurodivergent, she's a poet, she's all sorts of things people feel skittish about. She has Bear, a medical-assistance dog, which frankly was something I'd been largely unaware of the existence of for people like Alice. So it was natural and inescapable that their outsiderness calls each to the other. There really is no way to argue that it would ever be otherwise, either in reality or in fiction. Alice's father is in prison, her mother ran the hell away from the troubles, and her brother Joey has designs on a girl above his station. That girl's brother, the sports star, decides he'll make absolutely sure he drives a spike into these designs and uses Manny and Alice as his sledgehammer.
Stuff gets ugly. Stuff happens that inevitably will happen in every life. And all of it in the silly-buggers typography that caused me, too many times to count, to go back and forth and back and forth to figure out if we're still in the same sentence because NO CAPS = NO BREAKS!
Well, anyway, that's the old man speaking. And you'll notice that I finished the book, so the story obviously offered me something I wanted enough to keep laboriously decoding the damn thing.
That it did. Alice and Manny. Joey and Tilda. Bull and Louisa. People doing more than the minimum, for no reason other than it's the right thing to do. People reaching into each other's dark places and standing with the whole person not just the pretty, easy bits.
It's a well-made story that takes us on a realistic enough journey through a culture in the throes of challenge and change. So much for a simple, easy-to-process little story, eh what?
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
A WIZARD'S GUIDE TO DEFENSIVE BAKING
T. KINGFISHER
Red Wombat Studio (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now
Winner of the Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book at Worldcon 2021!
WINNER OF THE YOUNG-ADULT NOVEL 2021 DRAGON AWARD!
WINNER OF THE 2021 MYTHOPOEIC AWARD FOR CHILDREN'S LITERATURE!
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: Fourteen-year-old Mona isn't like the wizards charged with defending the city. She can't control lightning or speak to water. Her familiar is a sourdough starter and her magic only works on bread. She has a comfortable life in her aunt's bakery making gingerbread men dance.
But Mona's life is turned upside down when she finds a dead body on the bakery floor. An assassin is stalking the streets of Mona's city, preying on magic folk, and it appears that Mona is his next target. And in an embattled city suddenly bereft of wizards, the assassin may be the least of Mona's worries...
I USED MY LIBRARY TO PROCURE THIS BOOK...THEN I WENT OUT AND BOUGHT ONE. A YA NOVEL ABOUT A TEEN. AND IT ***just*** WON A LOCUS AWARD!!
My Review: First, read this:
Nobody said anything to me, and they didn’t exactly stare, but they knew I was there, and I knew that they knew, and they knew that I knew that they knew, all in a creepy, crackling tangle of mutual awareness.
–and–
“You didn’t fail,” I said. “They wouldn’t let you succeed. It’s different.”
–and–
When you're different, even just a little different, even in a way that people can't see, you like to know that people in power won't judge you for it.
What I'd like you to know is that I cherry-picked those lines for their content, not their felicity of construction or their stand-out euphony. That should give you an idea of the quality of Author Ursula Vernon's (pseudonymously known as Kingfisher) prose overall.
Why would a grouchy old fuffertut like me buy a (Kindlesale, to be fair) copy of a library book he's already read? Because he plans to re-read it. Yep...I want to have it so that I won't need to fuss my drawers procuring it when I am most in need of a laughing, weeping, cheering-my-fool-lungs-out read that doesn't have the effrontery to wink at me or let me know it's clever-clever. Story gets told, ideas get presented, world gets saved, and just keep the sourdough starter firmly in place or it'll get weird ideas.
Simple enough, surely.
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SORCERY OF THORNS
MARGARET ROGERSON
Margaret K. McElderry Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: All sorcerers are evil. Elisabeth has known that as long as she has known anything. Raised as a foundling in one of Austermeer’s Great Libraries, Elisabeth has grown up among the tools of sorcery—magical grimoires that whisper on shelves and rattle beneath iron chains. If provoked, they transform into grotesque monsters of ink and leather. She hopes to become a warden, charged with protecting the kingdom from their power.
Then an act of sabotage releases the library’s most dangerous grimoire. Elisabeth’s desperate intervention implicates her in the crime, and she is torn from her home to face justice in the capital. With no one to turn to but her sworn enemy, the sorcerer Nathaniel Thorn, and his mysterious demonic servant, she finds herself entangled in a centuries-old conspiracy. Not only could the Great Libraries go up in flames, but the world along with them.
As her alliance with Nathaniel grows stronger, Elisabeth starts to question everything she’s been taught—about sorcerers, about the libraries she loves, even about herself. For Elisabeth has a power she has never guessed, and a future she could never have imagined.
I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF THE LIBRARY. USE THOSE LIBRARIES, THEY NEED US!
My Review: I was absolutely ready, in my loving fandom for Genevieve Cogman's Invisible Library series, to gobble this book down with ecstatic slurps and croons of rapture. I was given so much good stuff about books, the love thereof:
It was always wise to be polite to books, whether or not they could hear you.
–and–
Books, too, had hearts, though they were not the same as people's, and a book's heart could be broken: she had seen it happen before. Grimoires that refused to open, their voices gone silent, or whose ink faded and bled across the pages like tears.
–and–
“You like this place?"
"Of course I do. It has books in it.”
–and–
"I knew you talked to books. I didn't realize they listened."
I was so on board! And then! Then!
“I like girls too, Scrivener.” Amusement danced in Nathaniel’s eyes. “I like both. If you’re going to fantasize about my love life, I insist you do so accurately.”
–and–
Nathaniel nodded. “If you can believe it, I used to fancy him. Then he went and grew that mustache. Or he murdered a gerbil and attached it to his face. For the life of me, I can't tell which.”
Unremarkably, given the necromantic nature of the being speaking, Elisabeth Scrivener is presented with casual, unrepentant male bisexuality. This being a creature rarer than a toothy hen, I was ever so ready to love this book. That it is from a professèdly wicked male being...well.
That's sort of where I got myself into the downs. The fact is that it's a YA novel and I'm extra-sensitive to the YA Twee Syndrome. Banter is fun, I like banter, but there's got to be something substantial in the soufflé to make it fix its claws in me. And that is where I just wasn't getting the underpinnings I needed for my edifice of pleasure. I'm sure as sure can be that a bookish young person wouldn't have my sliding-closer-to-seventy-daily old man's sense of wanting something more. The story rests on good foundation: Enemies to lovers, accepting Otherness in self and companions, defending Right and Truth against prejudice and ignorance. It just does as little with them as is practicable.
Fine for YA and not enough for old-man me.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE REBELLIOUS LIFE OF MRS. ROSA PARKS
JEANNE THEOHARIS as adapted with BRANDY COLBERT
Beacon Press
$18.95 trade paper, available now
ADAPTED FOR THE SCREEN BY SOLEDAD O'BRIEN! Premieres soon on Peacock.
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: This definitive biography of Rosa Parks accessibly examines her six decades of activism, challenging young readers perceptions of her as an accidental actor in the civil rights movement.
Presenting a corrective to the popular notion of Rosa Parks as the quiet seamstress performed a single act that sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott and birthed the modern civil rights movement, Jeanne Theoharis provides a revealing window into Parks' politics and decades of activism. She shows readers how the movement radically sought--for more than a half a century--to expose and eradicate the American racial-caste system in jobs, schools, public services, and criminal justice and how Rosa Parks was a key player throughout. The original text is fully adapted by the award-winning young adult author Brandy Colbert, for middle-grade and young adult readers to include archival images and personal papers of Rosa Parks, and to provide the necessary historical context to bring the multi-faceted, decades long civil rights movement to life. Colbert creates an engaging and comprehensive narrative centered on Parks' life of activism, to encourage readers not only to question where and who their history comes, but to search for histories beyond the dominant narratives.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU. CONTENT WARNING FOR RAPE.
My Review: Author Theoharis's 2014 Image Award-winning adult biography of civil rights icon Rosa Parks has been adapted for younger readers! Brandy Colbert's work for YA audiences has been on Los Angeles Public Library's Best YA Fiction lists, and has won a Stonewall Book Award in 2010. Between these two powerful writers, the project couldn't have been in better hands.
The story of Mrs. Parks's lifetime of struggle against the racial prejudice she was subjected to routinely, and the sexism that all women were subjected to while she was growing up, makes for sobering reading. The fact that both of these issues remain prominent in 2022's US national conversations does not speak well of our ability, as a body politic, to learn from our errors and omissions of thinking.
One of the city’s first responses to the boycott was to portray the problem as the actions of a handful of “bad apple” bus drivers. Officials insisted the problem was not segregation but rude drivers. City leaders said they wished the Black community had approached them sooner with the problem so they could have disciplined these drivers. Of course, this wasn’t true at all. Black people had been highlighting bus segregation that entire year and even before then, and each time, they’d been ignored. But this way, the city was able to blame the issue on a few bad people rather than a rotten system.
Lie, cheat, obfuscate...then lie some more. After all, it doesn't matter if you tell lies when you're Right.
The major issues that Mrs. Parks drew attention to are still present in US society. It really bids fair to wrap one's soul in a fog of despair, sixty-seven years after this brave woman made a stand against being treated as less than, other than, another person simply because of her skin color, and we're facing the same issues over and over again.
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TWO BOYS KISSING
DAVID LEVITHAN
Knopf Books for Young Readers (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$9.99 ebook & trade paper, $16.99 hardcover, available now
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: New York Times bestselling author David Levithan tells the based-on-true-events story of Harry and Craig, two 17-year-olds who are about to take part in a 32-hour marathon of kissing to set a new Guinness World Record—all of which is narrated by a Greek Chorus of the generation of gay men lost to AIDS.
While the two increasingly dehydrated and sleep-deprived boys are locking lips, they become a focal point in the lives of other teen boys dealing with languishing long-term relationships, coming out, navigating gender identity, and falling deeper into the digital rabbit hole of gay hookup sites—all while the kissing former couple tries to figure out their own feelings for each other.
I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT FROM MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE THEM OFTEN, Y'ALL!
My Review: Were I a teen, I'd be over the moon about this interlocking-loves narrative. I'm not, and I haven't been in a very very long time (the Bee Gees charted the last year of my teens), so my muted response to the teen-angst "does he/doesn't he/will he/won't he" stuff is pretty much assured.
“Love is so painful, how could you ever wish it on anybody? And love is so essential, how could you ever stand in its way?”
Others have commented on the dead gay men of my generation being the collective narrators with everything from tolerant smirks to outright derision. I am not a fan of second-person narration. At All. However much I don't like that narrative choice, I do feel the acknowledgment of those gone before is a net positive choice. We, the AIDS generation, largely vanished after the disease decimated us because there weren't descendants or loving memories in families for far, far too many of us.
This is what you do now to give your day topography--scan the boxes, read the news, see the chain of your friends reporting about themselves, take the 140-character expository bursts and sift through for the information you need. It's a highly deceptive world, one that constantly asks you to comment but doesn't really care what you have to say. The illusion of participation can sometimes lead to participation. But more often than not, it only leads to more illusion, dressed in the guise of reality.
Author Levithan doesn't hold with the vanishing of memory. He addresses this issue head-on and makes it a vibrant part of his narrative. This pleases me. I feel it as a chance for those gone to have The Talk with their spiritual descendants despite being incorporeal.
So all the stars for including the ancestors in present-day life.
But I'm old and cranky, so I'm retracting some stars for artificial inclusiveness. Not every point on the spectrum must needs be in every story. It could be my age showing (not a word, you) but it feels to me as though I'm being hectored. Again, not a teen, but as a teen I suspect I'd feel the same way. (Like I did about The Outsiders's preachiness all those years ago.)
You can give words, but you can't take them. And when words are given and received, that is when they are shared. We remember what that was like. Words so real they were almost tangible. There are conversations you remember, for certain. But more than that, there is the sensation of conversation. You will remember that, even when the precise words begin to blur.
–and–
We wish we could have been there for you. We didn't have many role models of our own—we latched on to the foolish love of Oscar Wilde and the well-versed longing of Walt Whitman because nobody else was there to show us an untortured path. We were going to be your role models. We were going to give you art and music and confidence and shelter and a much better world. Those who survived lived to do this. But we haven't been there for you. We've been here. Watching as you become the role models.”
Got a gay nephew? Cousin? Give him this book. Face down the outrage of the parents and show him he's not alone, not the first, and not bad/wrong/weird. I wish like hell this book had been around in 1972, instead of written by a man born then.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TJ KLUNE
$26.99 hardcover, $2.99 ebook editions, available now
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret.
Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge Of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages.
When Linus is unexpectedly summoned by Extremely Upper Management he's given a curious and highly classified assignment: travel to Marsyas Island Orphanage, where six dangerous children reside: a gnome, a sprite, a wyvern, an unidentifiable green blob, a were-Pomeranian, and the Antichrist. Linus must set aside his fears and determine whether or not they’re likely to bring about the end of days.
But the children aren’t the only secret the island keeps. Their caretaker is the charming and enigmatic Arthur Parnassus, who will do anything to keep his wards safe. As Arthur and Linus grow closer, long-held secrets are exposed, and Linus must make a choice: destroy a home or watch the world burn.
An enchanting story, masterfully told, The House in the Cerulean Sea is about the profound experience of discovering an unlikely family in an unexpected place—and realizing that family is yours.
THIS BOOK WAS A SURPRISE GIFT FROM AN OLD FRIEND. THANKS NORA!
My Review: I am defective. There are so many good lines in this book, aperçus and aphorisms and nostrums for your soul, and they're just terrific!
“Sometimes our prejudices color our thoughts when we least expect them to. If we can recognize that, and learn from it, we can become better people.”
–and–
“Just because you don’t experience prejudice in your everyday doesn’t stop it from existing for the rest of us.”
–and–
“Your voice is a weapon. Never forget that.”See? That's quality stuff right there! Author Klune makes sense, and aims it at the vulnerable, the different, the othered-by-the-mobs. I laud this, I support his aims and his aim.
Author Klune is very well-thought-of in the QUILTBAG writing community, deservedly so, and is always able to deliver a quality story that hits the proper beats, satisfies the story-hunger we all have as humans, and makes the very best out of his queer cast's longings. He does it again here! I promise you, if you're in the mood for a feel-good story of genuine lovingkindness defeating po-faced meanness, you have come to the right place.
But I don't want to read it. I've stopped and started and stopped and started and, frankly, I just can't. I read the book in four months. It can take a day to read a 400pp novel I'm really into.
Four months.
I don't want to read about kids. I don't care about adults who rescue kids...I think I might resent the numerous adults in my own life whose actions were the opposite of saving me...but whatever deep psychological things the book smacks into smarting, I just didn't enjoy reading it.
I hope you will, though.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Tove Jansson
Square Fish
$7.99 trade paper, available now
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: When Moomintroll learns that a comet will be passing by, he and his friend Sniff travel to the Observatory on the Lonely Mountains to consult the Professors. Along the way, they have many adventures, but the greatest adventure of all awaits them when they learn that the comet is headed straight for their beloved Moominvalley.
My Review: Dear little Moomintroll, who lives in a blue Moominhouse (for all Moominhouses are blue, you know) with Moominmamma and Moominpappa and his adopted sibling Sniff the little beast, has a perfect day of pearl-diving, cave-discovering, and comet-spotting behind him. It is the Muskrat, a philosopher and a nay-sayer par excellence, who lets Moomintroll in on the comet's likely collision with the earth, and gets little Moomintroll worried enough about the consequences to send him, with Sniff in complaining attendance, to the Lonely Mountains to find the professors in the Observatory so they can tell him if, and when, and preferably where, the comet will hit the earth.
Many adventures come the way of the travelers, who are fortified with all the goodies that Moominmamma can think of to pack. These include Sniff's favorite lemonade, and Moomintroll's woolly trousers in case it's cold in the Lonely Mountains (it is, but the trousers were thrown to the crocodiles to keep them from eating Moomintroll and Sniff, which worked, but left Moomintroll cold on the way to the Observatory, though not on the way back because the comet was making the earth so hot by then).
And Moomintroll meets his true love, the Snork Maiden, on the way. Oh, how sweet the Snork Maiden is! All green and fluffy, with a gold ring on her paw and a flower behind her ear!
Everyone, like Snufkin the wanderer and the Snork and his sister the Snork Maiden, and even the stamp-obsessed Hemulen, come back to Moominvalley to be safe in Moomintroll's (well, Sniff's if you want to be fair) cave with Moominmamma and Moominpappa when the comet hits the earth on October the seventh, at 8:42pm (and maybe four seconds), like the professors at the Observatory said it would.
But it doesn't, though it gets close, and it scares the whole family silly, and then they see the sea (which evaporated, cause it was so hot, and all Moominfolk love the sea so they missed it, and the octopus that tried to eat Moomintroll when they were walking across the sea-floor is back under water, thank goodness) so they know the world is all right.
The end.
Magical. Marvelous. Delightful.
And the best oath in the whole Universe, the one I'll swear by for the rest of my life, is on page 10: "May the ground swallow me up, may old hags rattle my dry bones, and may I never more eat ice cream if I don't guard this secret with my life." Seriously! I ask you! Could *you* break such an oath?!
If not for the LibraryThing 75ers's Fantasy February, I wouldn't have revisited this beautiful little parable about friendship, freedom, creativity, and love. I am so so glad I did. Tove Jansson, a designer and illustrator and cartoonist like her mother, created the sort of delight-filled universe I wish I could give to every child. Moominfolk are known and revered all over the world, and Jansson's native Finland has a Moominworld theme park! I wanna go! Operas have been written. Cartoon series have been made. Translations of the books into Ukrainian, into Urdu, into Japanese! Dolls! Artworks! It's Moominmadness!
And you can get in on the fun by buying an eight-dollar paperback book. So tell me, what are you waiting for?
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THE WEDDING: An Encounter with Jan van Eyck
ELIZABETH M. REES
Out of Print; available at online booksellers galore
Rating: 3* of five
The Publisher Says: Is the bride pregnant? Why does the groom look so old? What's reflected in the mirror? The Arnolfini Wedding is surely the most hotly debated painting of the Northern Renaissance—and one of the most beloved. In this historical novel, E. M. Rees weaves a rich story of love and honor that answers the questions about this great picture. At her first visit to the Duke's court, young Giovanna Cenami falls in love with a mysterious stranger employed by the famous Flemish painter Jan van Eyck. But Giovanna's romantic dreams are shattered when her father tells her she must marry a rich merchant to save them all from financial ruin. When she decides to pursue her own dreams, defying her family, she finds herself in grave danger of losing her reputation, her honor—and perhaps her life.
The Arnolfini Wedding is one of the most famous and most debated paintings in the world.
My Review: I just spent two very busy days, but made a little time to read The Wedding. It's a YA novel based on the famous Jan van Eyck painting The Arnolfini Wedding. Watson-Guptill, primarily an information publisher, did a series called "Encounters With Art" in which YA writers are asked to imagine stories based on or featuring famous works of art that are intended to illuminate (pun optional) the nature of painting and sculpture as storytelling media. Since humans are storytelling apes, this idea interested me.
Ms. Rees tells the story of young Giovanna, the bride in the painting, as she comes of age and discovers love and duty in her very different world. She falls in love with an unsuitable young man, a la Romeo and Juliet, during her first-ever night out as her father's arm ornament at a Burgundian court shindig in her new home of Bruges (recently arrived from Paris after her mother's death). While there, she also meets Jan van Eyck who asks for permission to paint her portrait. Her trip to van Eyck's studio is made still more exciting than it would be anyway by the...gasp!...appearance of the unsuitable love object!
Hijinks ensue. She marries dutifully, but wisely, knowing as she now does about the heart wanting what it wants, or else it doesn't care. The marriage lasts for forty years. Love? NEVER lasts forty anythings longer than maybe days.
Is this a book of brilliant writing? No indeed. Is it an entertaining book? Yes indeed. I like the idea of the series very much, and I liked the way Ms. Rees imagined the world of Bruges in the 15th century, and the way she wove fact and fancy together was deft and engaging. I recommend it withtout making a fuss about it.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
SHINE
Lauren Myracle
Amulet Books
$16.95 hardcover, available now
Rating: 2.5* of five
The Publisher Says: When her best guy friend falls victim to a vicious hate crime, sixteen-year-old Cat sets out to discover who in her small town did it. Richly atmospheric, this daring mystery mines the secrets of a tightly knit Southern community and examines the strength of will it takes to go against everyone you know in the name of justice.
Against a backdrop of poverty, clannishness, drugs, and intolerance, Myracle has crafted a harrowing coming-of-age tale couched in a deeply intelligent mystery. Smart, fearless, and compassionate, this is an unforgettable work from a beloved author.
My Review: Cat's friend Patrick is a faggot. Everybody knows it in their little Southern town, and the usual crew of fucking redneck assholes make Patrick's life a hell of taunts and pranks. Cat does what she can, but she's a girl, and nobody helps her.
Then one day, Patrick gets beat almost to death. Oh dear say the police the town faggot's been beat up tsk now who did that? Then they go eat donuts.
Cat sets out to solve the hate crime. She has her ideas about who did it. She bases them on the past behaviors of all the tormentors, and she bikes around town collecting clues, and she gets her brother to beat some richly deserving asswipes up, and she falls in love with the only decent boy in the state.
When the crime is solved, it's not a *huge surprise to the experienced reader, but it's still satisfying. Myracle doesn't let one single person off the hook, but by the same token, she demonizes no one and ridicules no one.
I have a hard time being as critical of this book as I feel honesty requires. I approve of its message, I like the whole set-up of a girl deciding that NO she WON'T sit down and stop rocking the boat, friendship means something in this world or we're well and truly lost.
The design is beautiful, from jacket to chapter-open art, to text design. The book looks handsome and important. The message is good. Why then is Krampus the Kristmas Kobold pooping on it with a 2.5-star rating?
They might be deployed in service of a plot that wins my hearty approval, but the elements of the story are stereotypical, wooden, and not freshly observed, described, or conceived. The dialogue is cutesy-folksy, or simply tin-eared, veering occasionally into wince-inducingly condescending. The positive portrayal of Jesus freakishness and regretting your sins equalling an obligation on the part of your victims to forgive you makes me boiling mad.
It's just not a good book. It IS a good story. But, oh how mean it feels to say this, but here goes: But Myracle's either a lazy writer relying on a bag of tricks that's served others a little too often before they get their latest airing, tatty and stringy and musty, here, or else is just not a very good writer at all.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE BOY WHO HARNESSED THE WIND
William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer
Illustrated by Elizabeth Zunon
Dial Books for Young Readers
$17.99 hardcover, available now
Rating: 4.5* of five
The Publisher Says: When fourteen-year-old William Kamkwamba's Malawi village was hit by a drought, everyone's crops began to fail. Without enough money for food, let alone school, William spent his days in the library . . . and figured out how to bring electricity to his village. Persevering against the odds, William built a functioning windmill out of junkyard scraps, and thus became the local hero who harnessed the wind.
Lyrically told and gloriously illustrated, this story will inspire many as it shows how - even in the worst of times - a great idea and a lot of hard work can still rock the world.
My Review: Four stars for the delightful story of a young man who does NOT allow cuts in education funding caused by economic crisis to interfere with his learning, for the clear benefit clearly ascribed to the public library donated by the US Government, for the tale of a vision pursued and a piece of the world changed because of it, and for a man telling his story so that no one can feel it can't be done.
The half star is all down to the lovely mixed-media illos by Elizabeth Zunon. The young man's face and his family's presence in soft pastels contrasted with the three-dimensionality of the maize, the sun, etc...how nice a counterpoint it made.
Friend Joe Welch praised this book, so I'm happy to credit him with the shove to read it. My mood improved markedly after reading the book and absorbing its implication that a person can indeed change his world by simply refusing to allow negativity to stall him. Mr. Kamkwamba, thank you for making an old man's day brighter.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TELL THE WOLVES I'M HOME
Carol Rifka Brunt
The Dial Press
$25.00 hardcover, available now
Rating: 3.5* of five
The Publisher Says: In this striking literary debut, Carol Rifka Brunt unfolds a moving story of love, grief, and renewal as two lonely people become the unlikeliest of friends and find that sometimes you don’t know you’ve lost someone until you’ve found them.
1987. There’s only one person who has ever truly understood fourteen-year-old June Elbus, and that’s her uncle, the renowned painter Finn Weiss. Shy at school and distant from her older sister, June can only be herself in Finn’s company; he is her godfather, confidant, and best friend. So when he dies, far too young, of a mysterious illness her mother can barely speak about, June’s world is turned upside down. But Finn’s death brings a surprise acquaintance into June’s life—someone who will help her to heal, and to question what she thinks she knows about Finn, her family, and even her own heart.
At Finn’s funeral, June notices a strange man lingering just beyond the crowd. A few days later, she receives a package in the mail. Inside is a beautiful teapot she recognizes from Finn’s apartment, and a note from Toby, the stranger, asking for an opportunity to meet. As the two begin to spend time together, June realizes she’s not the only one who misses Finn, and if she can bring herself to trust this unexpected friend, he just might be the one she needs the most.
An emotionally charged coming-of-age novel, Tell the Wolves I’m Home is a tender story of love lost and found, an unforgettable portrait of the way compassion can make us whole again.
My Review: Maybe it's the fact that I saw too many families like Finn the fag painter's to think Danni, his homophobic scum-bitch of a sister deserves any sympathy at all, while I was an AIDS volunteer in the early 1980s. Maybe it's my age and gender making me pretty much not in sync with the awkward coming-of-age of a plowhorse girl with a pretty sister.
Maybe it's just that I'm a mean old man.
I wore down fast in this debut novel, whatever the reasons, and while I yield to no one in my appreciation of Carol Rifka Brunt's phrase-making prowess, I found myself reading more for the lines than the story. I haven't thought that books about AIDS were groundbreaking since the 1980s. I haven't thought that gay uncles being their niece's pals were daring since then, either. I don't care much for the coming-of-age genre anyway, but read this because it has a lot of pretty writing in it. And in that way it lived up to the billing! In spades! What a pleasure it is to rock along the river of Brunt's words. She is a strong craftsperson of language.
Straight people probably like the story more than I do. No issue there, it's not written for a gay audience. So I give it stars for sheer word-pleasure.
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Dodie Smith
Out of Print; current editions are all abridgements, or based on the damned Disney craptastic cartoon. Heinemann's 1956 edition had 288 pages, shorter is worse, for once.
Rating: 5 stars out of five, because I still love the memory of being rescued
The Book Description: Pongo and Missis had a lovely life. With their human owners, the Dearlys, to look after them, they lived in a comfortable home in London with their 15 adorable Dalmatian puppies, loved and admired by all. Especially the Dearlys' neighbor Cruella de Vil, a fur-fancying fashion plate with designs on the Dalmatians' spotted coats! So, when the puppies are stolen from the Dearly home, and even Scotland Yard is unable to find them, Pongo and Missis know they must take matters into their own paws! The delightful children's classic adapted twice for popular Disney productions. Ages 8-11
(This is from a 1996 Barnes and Noble edition)
My Review: Mine wasn't an especially happy childhood. The particulars don't matter all that much, what does is that I was on my own in an adult emotional landscape a long time before that was a good idea. I am lucky beyond luck that I seem to have been born with a love of reading. Both my parents and both my older sisters read to me a lot when I was a kid, which doubtless had a lot to do with fanning the flames of my obsession with books; but there was never a sense in me that there was something else I'd rather be doing, even watching TV.
My mother and I, after the aforementioned sisters left us and my father was removed from our world, had all sorts of books in our house. I was the only kid I knew with a 6-foot-tall bookcase of my own books in his room when there was one digit in my age. And it saved my sanity, that stuffed story-world, so many many times.
One of the books that spoke to me on every level, which I discovered in the Allandale branch of the Austin Public Library, was this book. I was nine, I was miserably angry and unhappy, and I didn't know that anything was wrong. I found this book, this fabulous perfect rescue fantasy of authority figures who don't know their butts from their elbows but who know that they love, and want, their charges to be safe, and who go to extraordinary lengths to make it happen...well! That sounded peachy keen to my abandoned boy self. So I checked it out, and I read it. And I read it. And read it.
Easily a hundred times over the next two years.
No authority figures rescued me. I found some who loved me, but none could, or would, see the emotional hell I was in. When I was about twelve, the fantasy stopped satisfying my need and instead made its unsatisfied nature worse. So I stopped reading the book.
This christmas I decided to read the book again, just to see if there was as much here as I remembered, and to look at the pages with adult eyes.
I can't see it with adult eyes. Just as that desperate child full of reinflicted pain and rage. Oh the poor thing, I'd think, no wonder he re-read the book so often, look at this, or this...everything, really. It was a perfectly ordinary kid's book of its day, misogyny and elitism and racism permeating it with an almost industrial strength stench. But it also rang, and rings, true: Rescue me! It's a cry many kids don't vocalize but they do feel. Sometimes, for the lucky ones, they find stories to crutch them onwards towards adulthood.
For me, this was one fine, sturdy crutch. I still love it, and I still thank Dodie Smith for it, with all its time-and-place flaws. It's wonderfully parenthetical in its style and it's simply deliciously fantastically comfortable and comforting in its plotting.
A grateful salute, then, Miss Dodie Smith, from a forty-plus year distance, from a young redheaded fat kid lost in so many ways, for writing him a star to guide him. I'm here today because you did.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
FIRST DAY ON EARTH
Cecil Castellucci
Scholastic
$17.99 hardcover, available now
Rating: 2* of five
The Publisher Says: A startling, wonderful novel about the true meaning of being an alien in an equally alien world.
"We are specks. Pieces of dust in this universe. Big nothings.
"I know what I am."
My Review: Mal lives on the fringes of high school. Angry. Misunderstood. Yet loving the world -- or, at least, an idea of the world.
Then he meets Hooper. Who says he's from another planet. And may be going home very soon.
Seventeen-year-old narrator has teen angst over his alcoholic mother, his deserter dad, and his sense of life's futility, believes he's an alien abductee, and then meets an actual alien. Or just a wacko homeless dude. See, the alien/wacko joined the kid's alien contactee group. assuming this meant that the participants could get him a ride home as his ship was irreparably damaged on entry into Earth's atmosphere.
Where the ship is, no one asks. Why he has no help beacon, no one asks. But I anticipate.
Then one day, alien dude gets word that someone will pick him up if he'll meet them out in the California desert, not that far from where the action takes place. Narrator dude (if we're ever told his name, I've forgotten it) drives alien dude into the desert, wagging along a couple of misfit non-friends.
Alien dude *is* an alien, and will even take narrator dude away with him, but because the girl misfit showed narrator dude her tits he decides to stay on earth. The end.
I hated this book from p4 on. At that point in the narrative, the kid is in the shower room with a bunch of guys who don't like him, gets called gay, and muses that "being gay might be better" than being what he is: Unpopular and miserable.
You lost me, lady. You've used The Dreaded Gay as your point of reference for baseline badness. Now, the book is a YA book, so one doesn't necessarily expect narrative refinement from it, but this sloppy and cheap trick is an automatic fail.
Why no one wonders what happened to the ship that delivered alien dude to earth is beyond me. If it was totally destroyed, why wasn't he? Why, when narrator dude was wavering about the alien dude's truthfulness, didn't alien dude just take him to the ship's remains? Or show him the communications device he gets contacted on? By the time narrator dude decides to believe him, that's when he gets this ultrasupercool sounding star chart, which for some reason isn't mentioned but twice, and exactly never does it occur to narrator dude to take it to the SETI people and sell it for oodles of money, despite the fact that there are 27 intelligent species marked on the map. For that matter, what kind of BLITHERING IDIOT is the alien dude for giving such a thing to an Earthling?!
So from distasteful homophobia to disrespectful mishandling of SF's sacred tropes, this book gets a "boo hiss" from my green reptilian lips.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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