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Sword Mountain by Nancy Yi Fan

Nancy Yi Fan was eleven years old when she started writing the first novel in her Swordbird series, entitled Swordbird. I haven’t read Swordbird, nor have I read the second novel in the series, Sword Quest. And I had no idea that Ms. Yi Fan was a teen author until I finished reading Sword Mountain and read the author blurb in the back. Nancy Yi Fan’s writing matches that any adult fantasy author, and her deft handling of story, character, and theme outdo many authors with far more experience than she has.

Sword Mountain is the ancestral of the Golden Eagles, and as the story opens exiled musician Prince Fleydur is returning home to the Castle of the Sky as a hero. He and his brother, Prince Forlath, and their Eagle Army have defeated the archaeopteryxes and saved the kingdom. Unfortunately, not all of their enemies have perished, and not much has changed at the Castle of the Sky in Fleydur’s absence. The Iron Nest, the tribe’s ruling authority, still holds to tradition and a rigid social hierarchy, and Queen Sigrid is still enmeshed in her own selfish ambitions for her son Forlath. And nobody understands Fleydur’s love for music nor his compassion in rescuing an orphaned valley eaglet named Dandelion and bringing her to the Castle of the Sky to associate with the eagle nobility.

Dandelion becomes the heroine of the the story as she struggles to find her place and identity in a very rigid, rule-bound society. Fleydur is good, but a bit clueless, thinking that everybird, including the villains of the piece, means well and only needs a taste of music to make them understand the beauty of equality and freedom.

I liked the way this one was written. I liked the aphorisms at the beginning of each chapter. I liked the anthropomorphic birds who felt like characters from a human fairy tale, only with flying. I liked the strong, female protagonist who did the rescuing instead of being rescued. I liked the centrality of the two books, The Old Scripture and The Book of Heresy. I liked the themes of “hope and change”, slow, sure hope and change. I liked it all well enough that I’m hoping to go back and read the first two books in the series when Cybils season is over.

Sword Mountain is eligible to be nominated for the 2012 Cybils Awards for Middle Grade Science Fiction and Fantasy. Nominations open October 1, 2012.

Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan

Yes, both.

What if your teenage son got involved with a group of car thieves?

What if he got himself beat up trying to defend a schizophrenic friend from those same car thief cronies?

What if he then proceeded to get himself into even more trouble—with no end but a bad end in sight?

What if you were the pastor of the local Episcopal church? What if your son got arrested for murder?

Actually, this novel isn’t told from the parent’s point of view, but for some reason, I almost always turn books upside down and look at them from a parent’s viewfinder, at least for part of the time. And the scenario in Crazy Dangerous is a parent’s nightmare.

It’s also not too much fun for our teen protagonist, Sam Hopkins, who finds himself “in between a rock and a hard place.” He’s a good guy who’s running with the bad guys, and then he decides to take up a new motto, “Do right. Fear nothing.” However, it turns out that there’s a lot of really scary stuff going on in Sam’s little town, and Sam is caught right in the middle of the action.

I liked this story of a good kid, a normal kid, who’s in way over his head (literally, in the lake, at one point) and who’s just trying to do what’s right. At least most of the time he’s trying to do right. Except at the beginning of the book when Sam does something that he admits later is incredibly stupid. Sam’s term for his decision is that it was a “Dragnet”—dumb-da-dumb-dumb (like the theme music).

I would start using the term, but I don’t think my kids would get it. I do think that Karate Kid (age 15) would like this book a lot. He already sped through Klavan’s Homelanders series, which I recommend especially for teen boys who want their books to have lots of action and excitement. Crazy Dangerous fits that description, too.

Same Sun Here by Silas House and Neela Vaswani

The blurb says that this epistolary middle grade fiction novel is “narrated in two voices, each voice distinctly articulated by a separate gifted author.” I’m assuming that Ms. Vaswani wrote the letters from “Meena”, an Indian immigrant girl who lives in New York City, and Mr. House wrote the letters from “River Justice”, a boy who lives in the mountains of Kentucky. The two children are pen pals who prefer writing and sending letters the old-fashioned way—by snail mail.

The book takes place in 2008, and the election of that year, in which Obama became president, is a central event in the book. Neither Meena nor River knows why anyone wouldn’t be excited about Barack Obama becoming president. They write to each other about issues such as mountain top removal (a destructive way of coal-mining), prejudice, rent control in NYC, pollution, immigration policy, and about how all of these political issues affect them in their daily lives. They also write about family and school and difficult times and the ups and downs of becoming a teenager.

Even though the politics in the books didn’t match mine, and I could have wished that the two children would have explored the differences between the political cultures in Kentucky and New York with a little more balance and nuance, I did enjoy the story. Mostly I liked the honesty that Meena and River shared in their letters. They sounded like real children/young adults, and their friendship grew in an organic, believable way that kept me reading in spite of my frustration with the political agenda that peeked out at me in the subtext.

I think the politics will go over the heads of most elementary school aged children, and they’ll just enjoy the story.

YA Fiction You Can Skip

. . . ’cause I read it for you. I know about the 50-page rule and Nancy Pearl’s addendum to it:

When you are 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number (which, of course, gets smaller every year) is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book. As the saying goes, “Age has its privileges.”

But I still have trouble not finishing a book that I’ve started. Even if it’s a bad book, and I can tell it’s a bad book, I want to know what happens. I want to finish. It’s not a matter of guilt—it’s more curiosity. I can’t bear to not know. Did the book get better? Does it end the way I think (fear) it will? Do the characters become more or less likable? Is this book really as much of a train wreck as I think it is?

So, I finished the following YA novels, but you don’t have to read them. They really are not worth the time, unless there’s nothing else in the house to read or you’ve already started on one of these and have the same compulsion I have to finish.

Someone Else’s Life by Katie Dale. Such a soap opera, with a fictional soap opera actress thrown in as a minor character. Rosie’s mother dies of Huntington’s Disease, but Rosie finds out that her mom wasn’t her mom at all. Rosie and another baby were switched at birth! And that’s not a spoiler because that surprise revelation drops on page 46. But oh my goodness, there are many more confessions, and admissions, and drama-filled disclosures still to come—one about every forty or fifty pages in this 445 page tear-jerker. But I wasn’t crying because the roller coaster ride of emotional reunions and spectacular crises left me feeling . . . nothing much. It was all too, too much, and I just had enough curiosity to read to the end to see who would find out what next, and how many fireworks could be stuffed into one overly long book.

Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet. I really enjoyed reading two other books by award-winning author Mal Peet, Exposure, a novel set in South America and based on Shakespeare’s Othello, and Tamar, a book about World War II spies in Holland. However, this latest YA novel by Mr. Peet was a clumsy amalgam of two stories. In 1962,two British teenagers, Clem and Frankie, from different sides of the cultural divide, muddle their way toward a sexual liaison while world leaders Krushchev, Castro, and JFK blunder their way toward World War III in what later became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. These two events, the sex and the world crisis, are supposed to have something to do with each other, but I never saw the connection. At the point of connection, there is an actual explosion, and then at the end of the book another explosion (9-11) is supposed to lend irony to the entire mish-mash. But it doesn’t really. The novel was a disappointment with way too much graphic sex.

Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood St. by Peter Abrahams

In most books, Magic always follows rules. You can only get into Narnia under certain circumstances, with Aslan’s permission. In Half Magic by Edward Eager, you always get exactly half of what you wish for. The One Ring (Tolkien) works in a specific way to do specific things and can only be destroyed in one, very specific place. Harry Potter has to go to school to learn the rules of Magic in his world.

In Robbie Forester and the Outlaws of Sherwood St., Magic shows up, but it’s an unpredictable, capricious sort of Magic that only seems to have rules. The children involved in this magical adventure never do figure out the rules of when the “magic power” will appear, much less how to control it. It seems to have something to do with injustice: Robbie and her friends, Ashanti, Silas, and Tutu, receive magical help and powers whenever there is injustice to be righted. But, as Robbie notices, the world is full of injustice, and the magic only shows up sometimes, following its own rules that are unfathomable both to the reader and to Robbie and her merry band of outlaws.

Robbie Forrester and the Outlaws of Sherwood St. tells the tale of a group of four young teens who become friends in spite of their differing backgrounds and talents and join together to “rob the rich and give to the poor.” The villains in the piece are greedy capitalist land developer, Sheldon Gunn, his fixer/lawyer, Egil Borg, and a nasty little arsonist named Harry Henkel. The rob-the-rich and capitalists-are-evil subtext bothered me a little bit, but the story was well-paced and fun. Sheldon Gunn really is an evil capitalist who goes so far as to try to put a soup kitchen out of business (isn’t it always a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter?), and the kids are purely good, never even thinking about keeping some of the money they “steal” for themselves. There’s not a lot of nuance here, just old-fashioned good vs. evil with some temperamental magical help along the way.

There are questions raised in the book, about Ashanti’s family, about Tutu’s future, about the possible reappearance of the magical powers, that are not resolved. It looks as if we’re being set up for a sequel, or maybe this book just doesn’t follow the rules for a magical fantasy.