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The Royal Rabbits of London by Santa and Simon Sebag Montefiore

Royal Rabbits suffers from being somewhat cliche-ridden, with Hallmark greeting card dialog being thrown around like popcorn, but it definitely has its moments. For instance, the Queen’s corgi dogs aka The Pack, who are the Royal Rabbits’ rivals and nemeses, are named for infamous women of the past: Agrippina, Messalina, Livia, Lucrezia, Imelda, Lady Macbeth, Jezebel, Moll, and Helmsley. (Why are they all females?) And the rats are named Baz, Grimbo, and Splodge. Good naming, huh?

Caught between The Pack and the Ratzis, their other ancient enemies, the Royal Rabbits must protect the Queen of England and her royal family at all costs. Can Shylo, a small, simple country bunny, help the Royal Rabbits protect their queen from the evil machinations of the paparazzi Ratzis? This story reads like a Disney romp, complete with a chase scene, greasy rat villains, a small but brave hero (Shylo), and even a Disney-esque pep talk for Shylo at about midpoint in the story:

“Shylo, you found your way here, didn’t you? I don’t see the weary little rabbit who stands before me, but the brave Knight you may one day rise to be. My brother saw something in you, otherwise he would not have sent you on the dangerous journey to find us. I see it, too. Courage, my dear bunkin, courage. You’re braver than you know.”

Santa Montefiore and Simon Sebag Montefiore are husband and wife, parents to two children for whom they made up the stories of the rabbits who lived under Buckingham Palace. Simon is a well-known historian and novelist. I can definitely see this book made into an animated feature film. So, it’s a perfect match for fans of Disney and Disney-esque storytelling. And for real fans, there are three more Royal Rabbits books: Escape from the Tower, The Great Diamond Chase, and Escape from the Palace (January, 2019).

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book also may be nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Wisdom, Proverbs, and Aphorisms from Middle Grade Speculative Fiction, 2017

To pass safely through a jungle, one must walk either with stealth or with confidence. ~A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge.

Change is necessary and, deny it as we may, in the end change is always inevitable. ~A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge.

Wants and wishes cannot erase choices. Sometimes a road forks, and both paths lead to pain. The Song of Glory and Ghost by N.D. Wilson.

A leader doesn’t lead by proving how great he is—he leads by making the people around him great. ~Mysteries of Cove: Embers of Destruction by J. Scott Savage.

The real purpose of life [is] to live—to find out about the world and have adventures. ~The Matchstick Castle by Keir Graff.

Making others feel safe is a fine way to spend your days. ~Wishtree by Katherine Applegate.

Knowledge is a vessel deeper than the sea. A fool splashes in a pond and thinks he has the answers, but a wise man knows the only way to reach its depths is to ask questions. ~Race to the Bottom of the Sea by Lindsay Eager.

Once you’re up on a pedestal, you can’t take a step in any direction without falling. ~Miss Ellicott’s School for the Magically Minded by Sage Blackwood.

Surely it is counterproductive to expect sense from someone you are beating senseless. ~Thick as Thieves by Meg Whalen Turner.

Sometimes the way you get out of trouble is the same way you got in. ~The Tiny Hero of Ferny Creek Library by Linda Bailey.

Everyone deserves dessert. ~Zinnia and the Bees by Danielle Davis.

Doubtful friends are worse than enemies, and fire ants are the worst of all. ~The Danger Gang and the Pirates of Borneo by Stephen Bramucci.

The more people you care about, the more there is to scare you in the world. And yet, if you didn’t care about people, there would be nothing worth protecting. ~The Danger Gang and the Pirates of Borneo by Stephen Bramucci.

He who endures will conquer. So will he who never gets stung by a blister beetle. ~The Danger Gang and the Pirates of Borneo by Stephen Bramucci.

When your heart is beating too quick with nerves, there’s nothing like the rhythm of a poem to bring it right again. When you fill your mind with words—beautiful words, stirring words—those words drive away your other worries. ~Elizabeth and Zenobia by Jessica Miller.

History doesn’t judge leaders on how many times they fall. It judges them on how many times they get up. ~Mysteries of Cove: Embers of Destruction by J. Scott Savage.

. . . some secrets don’t like to be kept. They grow feet and tiptoe away in the night. ~Skeleton Tree by Kim Ventrella.

I’m working on a list of favorite aphorisms from 2018’s crop of middle grade speculative fiction. Do you have any to add?

The Stone Girl’s Story by Sarah Beth Durst

The Stone Girl’s Story is such a good exploration of story-making and moral free agency and growth and change. I am blown away by the depth of thought embedded in the story and the simple, understandable way in which the story unfolds.

Mayka, a living girl carved of stone, and her stone family of rabbits and birds and other creatures, live on the mountain where they were first created by the stonemason whom they called Father. They are animated and given their own stories by the marks the stonemason carved into their bodies when he made them. But Father eventually died and left the stone creatures he made behind. And now their marks are eroding and becoming faded and smooth. As their marks fade, the stone creatures will slowly wind down and come to a stop—unless they can find a new stonemason to re-carve their features and their stories.

To save herself and her friends, Mayka goes on a journey to find a stonemason. Like all fantasy journeys Mayka’s quest to save her family brings growth and change to Mayka herself, even if she is made of unyielding stone. Her companions on the journey are the stone birds, Risa and Jacklo, and along the way they meet Siannasi Yondolada Quilasa, Si-si for short, a tiny dragon with a big heart. With these friends and supporters, Mayka travels to the big city where she hopes to find another ally, a stonemason.

C.S. Lewis said of his Narnia stories that they were not allegories but rather “suppositions.”

“I did not say to myself ‘Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia’; I said, ‘Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.'”

The Stone Girl’s Story also reads like a supposition: “Let us suppose world in which stone creatures can come to life, and someone wants to enslave and control the stone creatures. Then imagine what might happen.” And it’s a very good supposition. Recommended.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book also may be nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

The Rose Legacy by Jessica Day George

I never was one of those horse-loving girls when I was a kid of a girl growing up in West Texas. Most of my friends loved horses, wanted to ride horses, longed to own their own horse(s), aspired to become veterinarians or barrel racers when they grew up. Not me. I went horseback riding once or twice, but it wasn’t my thing. I didn’t read horse books or study horse breeds or talk about horses with my friends. I was just not horse-crazy.

And I’m not sure The Rose Legacy, a new book by Jessica Day George, would have appealed to me back then. Ms. George, author of The Castle series about a magical castle and its inhabitants, has crafted a lovely fantasy set in a world where the horses are supposed to be extinct and forbidden and dangerous. But they’re not any of those things, really.

Anthea Cross-Thornley has no parents and has been shunted about from one uncaring relative to another for all of her life as far as she can remember. But now she is being sent to the home of an uncle she never knew she had, her father’s brother, and what’s worse, her uncle’s home, called The Last Farm, is outside The Wall in the Exiled Lands where only outlaws and wild animals live. How can Anthea become a Rose Maiden to the queen of Coronam when she is being sent to hinterlands, and will she even survive if it’s true that diseases were spread by the exiles and the horses that used to live in the Exiled Lands?

So, of course, the Exiled Lands turn out to be much different from what Anthea has been led to believe, and The Rose Legacy turns out to be a book about magical horses and about magical communication between horses and humans and about bonding with animals and as most good fantasy is, about a quest to save the kingdom. If you like horses or quests or magical worlds, you should give this one a try. Even an old horse-indifferent reader like me enjoyed the story. It had some good, tense moments, an unexpected villain, and a nice resolution, although I read hints that The Rose Legacy may be the first book in a new series. If so, horse lovers everywhere will be delighted.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book also may be nominated for a Cybil Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Winterhouse by Ben Guterson

Winterhouse is just the sort of fantasy mystery adventure story that I like. The setting is a luxurious hotel with lots of long, twisty halls and secret, locked rooms and exciting amenities, including, of course, a huge library full of old books. The plot is filled with coded messages and puzzles and late night adventures and unusual friendships. The protagonist is an orphan girl, Elizabeth Sommers, who loves to read, so lots of literary allusions. The cast of supporting characters includes the hotel proprietor, the mysterious Norbridge Falls, a friendly librarian named Leona Springer, Elizabeth’s new friend, Freddy Knox, and various other assorted villains, friends, and eccentric minor cast members.

In the story, the poor orphan girl, who lives with her unkind and neglectful aunt Purdy and Uncle Burlap, is unexpectedly whisked away by unknown benefactors to Winterhouse Hotel for the Christmas holidays. While Elizabeth is enjoying the hotel and all its charms—the library, ski slopes, an over-sized jigsaw puzzle, concerts, lectures, and more—she becomes aware that there is mystery and even danger lurking behind the happy facade of Winterhouse. With the reluctant help of the unadventurous but inventive Freddy, Elizabeth sets out to uncover the secrets of Winterhouse before those secrets overcome the goodness and cheer of the old hotel and its guests.

Yes, it’s a perfect set-up. But the execution wasn’t quite up to par. The dialogue and the actions of the main characters, Elizabeth and Freddy, were strained and sometimes unnatural. Norbridge Falls’s actions and particularly his speech patterns are mysterious and unpredictable, too, and I never understood why he was acting so secretive, eccentric, and strange. The author left a lot of loose ends and unanswered questions hanging, perhaps in view of a possible sequel to this debut novel, but it felt like a violation of the Chekov’s gun adage: “if in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act.” Why were the two jigsaw puzzlers, Mr. Wellington and Mr. Rajput (and their wives), included in the story? What was the significance of introducing them and their huge Himalayan temple puzzle into the plot? Who is Riley Sweth Granger, and where did The Book come from? What really happened to Elizabeth’s parents? Why are Freddy’s allegedly distant and hateful parents suddenly interested in spending time with him at Winterhouse? What is the significance of the Flurschen candy? Why do most of the women of the Falls family live to be exactly 100 years old?

Although some mysteries are resolved by the end of the book, these and many other questions that I had are left unanswered. I think the author may eventually hit his stride and give us some delightful middle grade fiction in the vein of The Westing Game and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but Winterhouse does read like a first attempt. It’s worth reading, though, if only for the allusions to Anne-with-an-e and Narnia and Westing Game and other similar classics. And the library. The library in Winterhouse is to swoon for!

Oh, and the illustrations in the book by Chloe Bristol are pitch-perfect, or pen-perfect. Enjoy the pictures and the puzzles and the bookishness. I’d say give it a chance, and perhaps look forward to the next book in a projected trilogy, The Secrets of Winterhouse, to be published in 2019. Perhaps I’ll get answers to some of my questions then.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Willa of the Wood by Robert Beatty

Willa is a young night-spirit jaetter of the Dead Hollow clan of the Faeran, an orphan and a sort of New world fairy? She’s also a woodwitch with the ability to talk to trees and plants and some animals, and she can change skin color like a chameleon and blend so that she can hardly be seen among the flora of the forest. Jaetters are thieves who come at night and steal from the day-folk for the benefit of the ruler of Willa’s clan, the paderan. Faeran believe in the guideline that “there is no I, only we”, but Willa is an individual. She escapes from the confines of her dictatorial clan life, but she finds that life without the clan is lonely and purposeless. So, most of the book is about Willa’s search for home, community, and family.

Who’s editing the books these days, anyway? Willa of the Wood tells a good story, set in the Great Smoky Mountains, with atmosphere and suspense and compelling characters and a touch of Americana (Cherokee characters, the mountains, panthers and otters and other animals native to the area). BUT there are some obvious glitches that a good editor should have noticed. The first paragraph of chapter 33 repeats the action in the last few paragraphs of chapter 32, as if the reader is picking up on a serial installment of the story. Why? None of the other chapters have this repetition (that I noticed), and it was disconcerting.

Then, there were niggling little questions I had as I was reading. The miller, Nathaniel, says he earns his living from the mill, taking one bag of cornmeal for every ten that he grinds, but no one ever comes to the mill to have their grain milled. And most of the time Nathaniel is absent from home, anyway. How can he run a business when he’s gone half the time and has no customers? And how many children were there in the underground prison? It seemed as if there were lots, more than Willa could visit or free, on multiple levels. Then, the story said that she freed only 23 or 24 children. What happened to the rest of the children? And why did the Faeran let the girl stay with her baby brother?

There were more questions I had as I read. Some were resolved; others were not. I can see how this fantasy fiction would appeal especially to children who live in the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee or South Carolina. Or those who like stories about communication with animals. The entire book is rather dark and melancholy, with themes of cultural annihilation, cruelty, power-grabbing, and greed. But, as I said, it may appeal to some readers. I thought it was OK, but I was kind of glad for the happy-ish ending. If it’s the first in a series, there wasn’t enough there to draw me back for a second go-round.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

The Last (Endling #1) by Katherine Applegate

Byx is the youngest and most vulnerable member of the dairne pack in a world where dairnes are about to become extinct. There aren’t many of these dog-like but intelligent and communicating creatures left in the world, and Byx doesn’t know whether to believe the legends and rumor that other dairne packs exist in the far off north or not. When Byx loses her own family, she goes on a journey to find the other dairnes, the ones who will keep her from being the endling, the last of her kind. Will she find them, and will the humans and other creatures that have joined her on her quest be her new family or will they betray her to the evil dictator, Murdano, who wants to destroy the dairnes and any other creatures who will not obey him.

This book has a lot of newly coined words and newly imagined creatures: dairnes, wobbyks, raptidons, felivets, and others. It reminded me of the Warriors and Bravelands series of books by Erin Hunter and of The Guardians of Ga’hoole books by Kathryn Lasky. Anthropomorphized animals or animal-like characters and a quest to save the world or the species or both make for good plots to hang a story upon. And The Last is a good story.

I did face the never-ending frustration as I was reading of realizing that I was about twenty pages from the end of the book, and the loose ends were numerous and the miles to go on the quest that forms the impetus for the plot were barely begun. So, this story wasn’t going to end neatly or even at all. That said, the ending wasn’t too bad; no one was hanging from the edge of a cliff, literal or figurative, at the close of this first volume.

The tone was rather dark. Extinction looms for the dairnes and for other species. Humans are taking over the world and running roughshod over the other governing species. In fact, humans are portrayed as greedy and power-drunk and traitorous liars, most of the time. The dairnes, on the other hand, never lie and always know when others are not telling the truth, a useful and rather dangerous skill in a world where a murderous dictator is trying to consolidate his reign over the other species. But this devotion to the truth doesn’t keep Byx from telling herself that since she may be the endling, perhaps her death would be better than living in a world where she is the only dairne left.

I feel as if this series can only improve as it moves into future volumes, but of course, that remains to be seen. Could this series be another Animorphs?

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

The Language of Spells by Garret Weyr

A dragon first spends fifty plus years trapped as an enchanted teapot. Then, as World War II is ending, the dragon, Grisha, is freed from his teapot spell entrapment, and he follows the rest of the dragons to Vienna where he is again trapped in a dead-end job at a castle and not allowed to leave the city. When Grisha meets Maggie at the Blaue Bar, the two of them embark up on a quest to free the dragons who have been put to sleep and imprisoned in an underground space. Maggie and her father, Alexander the poet, are two of the very few people who can truly see Grisha and the other un-imprisoned dragons, except that the tourists can see Grisha, too, and ask him questions in his day-job as a tour guide at the castle.

I found this one to be really odd. I kept wanting to read it as allegory, in the way that C.S. Lewis insisted his Narnia books were NOT allegorical, but I couldn’t make anything fit. Maybe it’s just my way of reading. Is it a book about the Holocaust? No, although there are elements that evoke a persecuted and misunderstood minority. About the industrial revolution and modernity and its effect on faith and whimsy and beauty? Maybe, kinda sorta. About Communism and it’s effect on Eastern Europe? Not really. It’s set mostly in an alternate history fantasy Vienna. It’s not really any of those things, just odd, and contemplative and a little slow. But I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to contemplate or think about.

And the rules of the story or the world in which it was set kept shifting in a disconcerting way. The cats are evil. No, not really evil. Well, maybe. Most people can’t see the dragons, but the tourists can see and talk to the dragons who work as caretakers and tour guides at old castles. Magic requires a price. So, it’s kind of cruel. But we want to go back and live in a magical world anyway. Nostalgic longing for the days of magic abounds. Memories are malleable and fragile. Memories are the most important part of who we are. I guess it did make me think, but I’m still not sure what I think about the book as a whole. (I did find the couple of times that Maggie’s father uses God’s name in vain to be disconcerting, annoying, unnecessary and perhaps out of character.)

It’s a decent book, but I’m not sure who would like it enough to stick with it. Amazon says it’s about “the transformative power of friendship”, and I did like the friendship between Maggie and Grisha. However, that wasn’t enough to really pull me into the story and make me believe in magical Viennese dragons.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Wizardmatch by Lauren Magaziner

We all have such different senses of humor. What to me is just silly may be laugh out loud funny to you. What is witty and fun for me may be boring to another person. So, when I say that humor in Wizardmatch just didn’t tickle my funny bone, that’s not to say that it won’t poke yours or that it shouldn’t. A chocolate pudding swimming pool, a boy whose magical talent is burping out birds, a wizard grandfather who is a spoiled brat—these just weren’t very humorous to me. But you—or your kids– may find them to be hilarious.

“Mortimer de Pomporromp—the oldest, most powerful, most celebrated wizard in his entire family—had the sniffles.”

Now, that’s a promising first line. I liked the name, Mortimer de Pomporromp. I liked that Mortimer’s granddaughter Lennie, the actual protagonist of the book, was half-Filipina. I liked Mortimer’s sensible assistant, Estella. I liked the persnickety cat, Fluffles aka Sir Fluffington the Fourth. I liked the eventual emphasis on forgiveness and family unity and teamwork.

I didn’t care for the constant sparring and fighting that went on between all of the characters in the book. I just didn’t like any of them very much. I didn’t like the snot/barf/gross motif that wove its way throughout the story either, although I realize that repetitive emphasis on bodily functions wasn’t written in for my benefit. Authors think middle graders in particular love that kind of stuff, and they write down to them, IMHO.

Then, there were some things in the book that just didn’t make sense. Lennie thinks her grandfather may be favoring her brother Michael over her partly because she’s a girl but also because she’s part Filipina. However, Poppop Pomporromp does favor Michael, who’s also half Filipino. When the villain of the story is trapped in a supposedly inescapable sticky trap, it turns out that it is escapable after all. And all of the adults in the story are horrendously bad at being mature adults; they’re more childishly competitive and bickering than the children. (Maybe that’s not so unrealistic as I wish it were.)

Final word: I didn’t care for it. You may like it better than I did. It depends on your sense of humor.

Amazon Affiliate. If you click on a book cover here to go to Amazon and buy something, I receive a very small percentage of the purchase price.
This book may be nominated for a Cybils Award, but the views expressed here are strictly my own and do not reflect or determine the judging panel’s opinions.

Born on This Date: Carol Kendall, b.1917, d.2012

The Gammage Cup by Carol Kendall. The story of five non-conformist Minnipins who become unlikely heroes. The Periods, stodgy old conservatives with names such as Etc. and Geo., are wonderful parodies of those who are all caught up in the forms and have forgotten the meanings. And Muggles, Mingy, Gummy, Walter the Earl, and Curley Green, the Minnipins who don’t quite fit in and who paint their doors colors other than green, are wonderful examples of those pesky artistic/scientific types who live just outside the rules of polite society. The Gammage Cup was a Newbery Honor book in 1960.

The Whisper of Glocken by Carol Kendall. A sequel to The Gammage Cup, Whisper continues the story of the Minnipins and their isolated valley home. In this story which takes place among a new generation of Minnipins, the Minnipin valley is being flooded. Five new unlikely heroes—Crustabread, Scumble, Glocken, Gam Lutie, and Silky— set out on a quest to release the dammed river.

The Firelings by Carol Kendall is a third fantasy novel for middle grade readers and older, but it does not take place in the the world of the Minnipins. Instead, the Firelings are a group of people who live underneath a volcano and worship the fire god, Belcher. As the heretofore dormant volcano begins to erupt, a group of again “unlikely heroes” must find a way to save the Firelings.

Ms. Kendall also wrote a couple of children’s mysteries, a couple of adult mysteries, and two collections of folk tales, Chinese and Japanese. She liked to travel, but made her home in Lawrence, Kansas.

In a 1999 lawsuit, an author, Nancy Stouffer, accused J.K. Rowling of plagiarizing the name “Muggles” from her books. But Rowling’s lawyer pointed out that Carol Kendall used the name “Muggles” for one of her, very ordinary, characters many years previous to Rowling’s or Stouffer’s use of the term/name. Carol Kendall is said to have laughed at the brouhaha and said, “I’ve got no quarrel with them … There’s only so many ideas and if you have one then someone else out there probably has the same one, too.”

Quotes from Kendall’s books:

“No matter where There is, when you arrive it becomes Here.”

“When you say what you think, be sure to think what you say.”

“You never can tell
From a Minnipin’s hide
What color he is
Down deep inside.”

“If you don’t look for Trouble, how can you know it’s there?”

“Where there’s fire, there’s smoke.”

“It was easy to be generous when you had a lot of anything. The pinch came when you had to divide not-enough.”

“No hurry about opening his eyes to see where he was. If he was dead, he wouldn’t be able to open them anyway; and if he was alive, he didn’t feel up to facing whatever had to be faced just now. After a while it occurred to him that he had no business being dead. You couldn’t just selfishly go off dead, leaving your friends to their fate, and still feel easy in your mind.”

“[I]t came to him—–the truth about heroes. You can’t see a hero because heroes are born in the heart and mind. A hero stands fast when the urge is to run, and runs when he would rather take root. A hero doesn’t give up, even when all is lost.”

All three of Kendall’s fantasy novels for children, but especially The Gammage Cup, are not as well known as they ought to be and also highly recommended—by me.