Book 2 of the Ascendancy Trilogy. I’m about to make a rule for myself: no more trilogies, series, or maybe even sequels. I’m tired of half-finished stories. However, if I made that rule I’d have to make an exception for Jennifer Nielsen’s Ascendancy trilogy.
The Runaway King is just as good as (or better than) the first book in the Ascendancy Trilogy, The False Prince, which was the Cybils award winner last year in the Middle Grade Speculative Fiction category. In Book Two, Prince Jaren has become King Jaron, but his grip on the throne is none too secure. Both the neighboring kingdom of Avenia and the cutthroat Pirates are ready to attack Jaron’s rather weak little country of Carthya, and these two enemies may actually be in league with one another. Not only does Jaron doubt himself and his ability to be a good king, but the most of the Council also want to replace Jaron with a regent. And Jaron’s not sure whom he can trust, and there’s the unresolved quandary of a princess he’s required to marry versus a commoner friend he loves and wants to protect.
When Jaron’s past catches up with him in the form of an assassination attempt, he does the only thing he can: he disguises himself, runs away, and goes to confront Carthya’s enemies. Self-sacrifice is a big theme in this volume of the story, and Jaron is growing and learning as he tries to balance his responsibilities, his desire for justice, and his commitments to friends. It’s not an easy balance to maintain, and he has a kingdom to save while he’s at it.
The third book in the trilogy, The Shadow Throne, is due out in February, 2014. I may go back and read all three books together when I get my hands on all three. And I may just try to establish a policy of waiting until all three books in a trilogy are published and available before I start reading, instead of banning series altogether. If I have the patience for such a policy . . .
Do you know the Great Truth and the Central Secret of the British Empire? Probably not, if you’re human like me, so here it is:
FOR EVERY JOB A HUMAN HOLDS, THERE IS A MOUSE WITH THE SAME JOB, AND DOING IT BETTER.
So, there are needlemice and coachmice and guard mice–all sorts of mice, each with his or her own job, mirroring that of the humans who live in the houses, and palaces, of England. Unfortunately for the protagonist of this story, although he is a mouse, he is a very small mouse with no job and no name. Some of the other mice call him Mouse Minor because he is so small, but that’s not really a name. And our narrator has something of an identity crisis: he’s full of questions and gets very few answers from his aunty, Head Needlemouse Marigold.
I loved that fact that this book is full of repetitive motifs and running gags and just gentle humor. The mouse world itself is delightful to explore. Set down in the secret, hidden pockets of Victorian England where Queen Victoria is about to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee: Sixty Years Upon the Throne, the mice study in schools, sew costumes and uniforms, pledge service to the Queen, and generally keep themselves hidden from but indispensable to humans. When Mouse Minor asks about his name, he is told several times that “Nameless is Blameless”, as if that settles the question. His tail, shaped like a question mark, emphasizes all of the questions that Mouse Minor entertains and asks incessantly of himself and of everyone else. Not that he gets any answers–until the end of the story.
Illustrator Kelly Murphy is the same artist who illustrated Elise Broach’s Masterpiece, another book about a tiny creature in a human-sized world, and her illustrations are detailed, vivid, and uite a complement to the story. Note particularly page 121, “a fall from this height would do me in”: Mouse Minor is in the foreground of the picture, being dangled by some unknown flying creature from a great height above a human ballroom where tiny human dancers are bowing and dancing in courtly fashion. Then on page 140, we get to view an illustration of Queen Victoria herself, in all her (faded) glory.
I definitely recommend this book for a Cybils nomination.
Prince Liam, Prince Frederic, Prince Duncan, and Prince Gustav are back, and they’re just as klutzy and heroic as they were in the first book in this series, The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom. And the ending to this book, which I will not reveal even if you torture me, promises more adventures to come for The League of Princes.
I find these books and the princes and their princesses to be silly, hare-brained, ludicrous, comical, foolish, crackpot, preposterous, and absurd. In short, I used a thesaurus, and the books made me laugh. If you want to go on a Hero’s Guide blog tour and get introduced to all of the heroes and heroines, and even the villains, you can find those links here. Or you could just read the books.
A few choice quotes to whet your appetite: Prince Gustav: “Today’s lesson is brawling. Everybody start beating up your neighbor.”
Prince Duncan (from his work-in-progress, The Hero’s Guide to Being a Hero): “The element of surprise can offer a hero great advantage in battle. The element of oxygen—also important.”
Prince Frederic: “No one is defined by a single act, whether it was years ago or weeks ago. We’re all given chances to change, to make up for things we’ve done wrong. It’s how we handle those opportunities that really matters. For most of my life, I ran and hid from anything remotely dangerous. Does that make me a coward now? No.”
Prince Liam: “I’m Liam of Erinthia! Getting out of tough situations is what I do best!”
“John W. Otte leads a double life. By day he’s a Lutheran minister. By night, he writes weird stories.”
Failstate is kind of weird. Robin Laughlin aka Failstate and Robin’s brother Ben aka Gauntlet are both unlicensed superheroes. Failstate is a “cognit” who can mess with the power grid. The theory is that Failstate’s super-power can create “a potential failstate within covalent bonds at a molecular level.” Gauntlet is a “strapper”, a hero with lots of muscle.
Both of the brothers are competing in a reality TV show. The winner gets a real superhero license if he or she is voted best superhero in the show. Unfortunately, Robin/Failstate is pretty sure that the winner is not going to be him.
Soon, real life and real crime collide with the fantasy crime competition on TV, and Failstate must decide how to avenge his friend’s death, whom to trust, and how much protecting his secret identity is worth. Is it worth more lives? What if he has to lose the competition and his secrets to gain his ultimate goal, the protection of innocent citizens?
Failstate was just nominated as a finalist for the Christy Awards in the category of Young Adult Books, along with Child of the Mountains by Marilyn Sue Shank and Interrupted: A Life Beyond Words by Rachel Coker. I think Failstate is a worthy competitor, both the character in the book and the novel in the Christy Awards.
About the first book in this fantasy series by N.D. Wilson, I wrote: The Dragon’s Tooth by N.D. Wilson. Too much action and it moved way too fast for me. I think there was a sub-text that I just didn’t get, and I think Mr. Wilson is too smart for my Very Little Brain.
Reading the second book in the series helped my little brain a little bit, but I really should just wait until all of the (three?) books in the Ashtown Burials series are out and then I could read them all together. I’m pretty sure my little brain would thank me for not asking it to remember a book I read over a year ago and put it together with a book that I’m reading now that demands a lot of thought and remembering on its own merits.
Anyway, The Dragon’s Tooth is “the only object in the world capable of killing the long-lived transmortals, and Phoenix (the bad guy) has been tracking them down one-by-one, and murdering them.” Cyrus and Antigone Smith had the dragon’s tooth in the first book, but they lost it to the bad guys, and now almost everyone is mad at them. Transmortal Gilgamesh is especially angry, and he and his fellow transmortals have come to Ashtown to demand that the Order of Brendan offer protection or justice or something. So Antigone and Cyrus end up on the run from the Order, from Gilgamesh, from Phoenix, and from other evil characters who are out to destroy everything and take over the world.
If that paragraph doesn’t explain what the Ashtown Burial books are all about (and it doesn’t), then maybe this book trailer will help.
For what it’s worth, I like the books, but I think I’ll like them better when the series is complete.
War and peace is a recurring theme in literature, in movies and television, and in history. Seraphina, winner of the Cybil Award of 2012 in the Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy category, is about trust and mistrust between two different species, dragons and humans, in the kingdom of Goredd. My latest (second) K-drama, The King 2 Hearts, is about war and peace, trust and mistrust, between North and South Korea. Both the book and the TV series share some commonalities:
Tough-as-nails, but tender on the inside commoner girl meets insecure, but charming prince. Romance ensues.
Cultural differences create misunderstandings and lead two nations to the brink of war.
Evil villain tries to provoke war between the two groups.
Relationship between the girl and the prince mirrors the uneasy relationship between the two countries. Danger lurks everywhere, and almost all of the main characters come near to death multiple times in both Seraphina and King 2 Hearts.
There are also differences between the two stories. In the book, the dragons are emotionless, mathematical, and super-rational, unless they have taken on human form in which case they must be on guard against getting tripped up by human emotions. Yes, the dragons can transform into human bodies. (No, the humans can’t get dragon bodies–which doesn’t seem quite fair.) And Seraphina, our young protagonist, has a very special problem: she hides a secret that would, if revealed, turn everyone, both dragon and human against her and perhaps cost her life.
So, there’s a lot of interplay in Seraphina between the supposed opposite ways of viewing life: artistic and emotional or mathematical and rational. Unfortunately, Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk did it better. The idea of bridging cultural differences and making peace by bringing together two cultures is more interesting. Seraphina brings together the two cultures in the book because she has a unique identity, (POSSIBLE SPOILER) half dragon and half human. In King 2 Hearts the attempt to bridge two cultures is embodied in the proposed marriage of the South Korean prince to a North Korean bride. Of course, reconciling two disparate cultures is difficult, whether it’s an internal conflict or recurring discord and confrontation between two people who actually love each other.
It’s the conflict that keeps the story fresh and compelling. King 2 Hearts consists of 20 episodes, a length that I’m told is common for Korean dramas. It probably could have been improved by being shortened by about five episodes and tightened up. Some of the characters—the “psycho” super-villain, his stoned hired assassin, and the U.S. government official with the speech impediment, in particular–were rather unbelievable and cringe-worthy. But the series itself was addictive; I kept thinking I’d watch just one more episode, then one more, then one more . . .
If you want some (mostly clean) romance embedded in a story with Important Stuff to Say about war and peace I’d recommend Seraphina if you have a few hours to read a fantasy novel, and King 2 Hearts only if you have about twenty hours to invest in a roller-coaster of a TV show, with sub-titles and loads of Korean politics, mores and traditions. Consume both if you’re a glutton for political drama, fantasy, spy thrillers, romantic sparring, and a surprising but satisfactory resolution.
I hope to write more about King 2 Hearts and the other K-drama that I’ve watched, Queen In-hyun’s Man, soon. Suffice it to say I think I already have a K-drama problem, and I can’t, can’t, can’t start any more shows anytime soon or else I might be accused of family-neglect.
Time travel at its most historically teach-y. I learned a lot about the Dreyfus affair, but the time travel elements of this story were too unbelievable. Mira keeps traveling back and forth from our time to various times in the late nineteenth century, and she meets many of the same people at different key points in their lives: Degas, Monet, Mary Cassatt, Emile Zola. The problem is that none of these people seem too surprised or inquisitive when she stays the same age, but shows up at five and ten year gaps in their nineteenth century lives.
There’s a bit of romance thrown into the mix when Mira gets a crush on Degas’s assistant, Claude, but this element, too, is spoiled by the time lapse time-traveling that Mira does. Claude gets older Mira doesn’t. Her main mission, to find a way to motivate people to defend Dreyfuss and nip French anti-Semitism in the bud meets with mixed success at best, probably because history didn’t really turn out that way, did it?
Marissa Moss is the author of the very popular Dear Amelia series of diary/graphic novel/picture books for younger readers. This diary, the first in a projected series, is for older middle grade young people, and the fact that it has a Jewish protagonist is refreshing. However, I don’t think I can get my middle grade readers to try this one on the basis of their love for the Amelia books. It’s just too different, even though it does have some drawings included in the text since Mira is an artist. The sequel to Mira’s Diary: Lost in Paris is Mira’s Diary: Home Sweet Rome, due out in April, 2013. In this second one, Mira goes time-traveling again and meets the sixteenth century artist Carvaggio, so the art theme carries on through the series.
Giannine is trapped in a virtual reality video game when protestors from the group Citizens to Protect our Children (CPOC) vandalize the gaming center where she is playing. Because of the damage the protestors caused, the only way for Giannine to get out of her game is to survive and win it by becoming the next king of the game’s fantasy world. Unfortunately, true to the game’s rules, every time Giannine makes a mistake and “dies” in the game, she goes back to the beginning to start all over. And soon if she doesn’t finish the game, her brain is at risk of fatal overload, or Real Death.
I never felt as if I knew who Giannine was outside of her game world, so I was never really invested in her success. In Deadly Pink, a book with a similar plot, I really identified with the two main characters and wanted them to be O.K. because they had issues and personalities that made me care. In Heir Apparent there are hints at issues and themes of family conflict and father-neediness, but those themes are never developed. Giannine remains a funny, witty character, but rather flat with little or no growth or change in her life and personality by the end of the story.
Book 2 of the Ascendancy Trilogy. I’m about to make a rule for myself: no more trilogies, series, or maybe even sequels. I’m tired of half-finished stories. However, if I made that rule I’d have to make an exception for Jennifer Nielsen’s Ascendancy trilogy.
