The Glass Sentence by S.E. Grove

Sep29

Maps, maps, and more maps. If your fascinations veer toward the cartological, especially if there’s an intersection with the fantastical, then this debut novel by “historian and world traveler” S.E. Grove will be just the ticket.

Since the disappearance of her parents when she was a small child, Sophia Tims lives in Boston with her uncle, Shadrack, a famous cartologist and former adventurer. However, this Boston is not the Boston we all know. Almost a century before, The Great Disruption shook the entire earth and threw different parts of the globe into different “ages” or time periods, remaking and disrupting time itself. Boston is now part of the New Occident, beginning after the Great Disruption in the late eighteenth century. Explorers and pirates are the only ones who dare to travel from one age to another, across boundaries that delineate more than just governing authorities or time zones—they also demarcate eras and the cultures associated with those eras.

Accurate, trustworthy maps are very important in such a world, and Shadrack is the most famous and reliable mapmaker in Boston, perhaps in the world. He is teaching Sophia all he knows, but when kidnappers and changes in the weather patterns interrupt their lessons, Sophia must set out on her own with only a runaway from the Baldlands, Theo, to help her escape from her pursuers and find the answers to what is happening to her, to Uncle Shadrack, and to the New World. And she’s not even sure she can trust Theo.

The world-building in this 489 page novel was exquisite. The story was well-plotted, and the characters were engaging, especially Sophia and Theo and Calixta the Pirate Captain. (I like that name, Calixta. If I had another child . . .) The only complaint I have, and it’s really a small complaint, I suppose, is that I never felt I knew what the story was about or what the underlying themes were. It seems to be partly about trust and lies, but the messages about whether those things are good or bad or indifferent are mixed. It’s also about time and maps and fate, but I’m not sure what the novel is saying about those things either. (Maps are good? We can live outside the constraints of time if we try? You can’t escape your fate, so don’t try?) Not every novel has to have a deep theme, but if it runs to almost 500 pages, I would expect it to say something about something.

Maybe I just didn’t get the something.

If you want a little more to go on before you commit, check out Charlotte’s review at Charlotte’s Library or Becky’s at Becky’s Book Reviews. It is a good book —especially for map-lovers and fantasy world dwellers.

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 is also 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.

Greenglass House by Kate Milford

Sep27

Setting: Wintertime, almost Christmas, in an old four-story smugglers’ inn at the top of Whilforber Hill near the village of Nagspeake. Each floor of the inn has a beautiful stained glass window, and the guest rooms also have greenglass windows and old-fashioned, but comfortable furniture. There’s an attic full of treasures and junk, and the inn has outbuildings and a garage to explore, too. Plenty of room for mystery, treasure-hunting, and clues.

Characters: Milo Pine, the innkeepers’ adopted son, Mr. and Mrs. Pine, Milo’s parents, and several mysterious, unexpected guests.

Plot: Milo and his friend Meddy attempt to solve the mystery of Greenglass House and its history by taking on roles as players in a role-playing game. Milo is a blackjack, and Meddy is his scholiast.

Almost every review I read of this little gem of a book compared it either to The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin’s Newbery winner and mystery classic, or to Agatha Christie. And without having read those reviews beforehand, I also thought of The Westing Game and of Christie’s The Mousetrap or other books where the cast is snowed in or otherwise isolated (And Then There Were None). Greenglass House is not your typical children’s mystery story. In fact, you can read about three unspoken rules that author Kate Milford breaks in her novel, to the betterment of the story IMHO, in Betsy Bird’s insightful review at A Fuse #8 Production

I noticed, and enjoyed, the loving and involved adoptive parents. Mr. and Mrs. Pine are very busy with their inn and their unexpected guests, but not too busy to check on Milo and to do things with him and for him to make his Christmas special. I also liked the fact the the story is set at Christmastime. And it feels like an old-fashioned Christmas with a Christmas tree, a Christmas Eve gift for Milo, father/son sledding, hot chocolate by the fire, and story-telling. The setting is indeterminate, sort of Victorian with no cell phones or computers in evidence, but also modern with an electric generator for back-up electricity and up-to-date speech patterns and behavior. So that gives Christmas at Greenglass House a timeless feel.

Milo is a great protagonist, too. He’s very conscientious; he does all of his homework on the first day of vacation so that he can have the rest of the holidays to play. He’s resistant to change, but also intelligent and adventurous. He and Meddy make a good team since she inspires and encourages him to step out and use his imagination to solve the mysteries that the two of them encounter.

Greenglass House would be a lovely Christmas read-aloud book for a class or a family in the holiday mystery mood. I recommend it.

Nagspeake Online: The Nagspeake Board of Tourism and Culture.

Dreamwood by Heather Mackey

Sep23

Lucy Darrington, age twelve, runs away from her school in San Francisco and rides a train to the Pacific Northwest where her father, a scientist and expert ghost clearer, has been searching for a job. Mr. Darrington promised Lucy that he would send for her as soon as he got settled, but Lucy hates her prim and proper nineteenth century school so much that she just can’t wait.

When Lucy arrives in Saarthe, the place where her father is supposed to be living, she finds that he has gone missing. Lucy’s father is probably lost on a peninsula called The Devil’s Thumb, where a rare and magical tree called the Dreamwood may hold the key to curing the Rust, a blight that is killing all of the trees. If Lucy goes in search of her father, will she get lost in the Dreamwood, too?

The unusual setting for this middle grade fantasy deserves a bit of analysis and meditation all on its own. The scene is recognizable as the Pacific Northwest: north of San Francisco, trees and lumberjacks, totems and native peoples, Pacific Ocean to the west. The time period is “forty years after the bloody North-South War,” so perhaps around the turn of the century? However, instead of the United States, we read about “the American States” juxtaposed against “the First People’s Federation territory.” The author says she chose to “imagine an America where—in some places, perhaps—there was a different outcome to the wars and policies that have shaped the history of indigenous peoples on this continent.” Part of that different outcome involves an imagined group called the Lupine Nation, whose princess, Niwa, becomes Lucy’s friend and encourager.

So, we could add this fantasy to a “diversity in middle grade speculative fiction” list, even though Niwa is not the leading character in the novel. Not many middle grade fantasies involve Native American peoples at all, real or imaginary ones. The villain of the piece is the typical Big Businessman. (Why are all fantasy villains either fat greedy businessmen or skinny witches?) The children who go on the quest to find Mr. Darrington and the Dreamwood, Lucy and her friend Pete, are typically intrepid and tenacious, but they do have faults which are teased out in the narrative as their journey uncovers their weaknesses and causes growth in character and in wisdom for the children.

As I began reading about ghost clearing and magical trees, I wasn’t sure I’d like this one, but I did. The ending is as unusual as the rest of the novel, and I”m still not sure what to think about the sacrifice that is required of Lucy in the end. But it did make me think, which is always a good thing. The Dreamwood forest reminded me of Tolkien’s forests and Old Man Willow, dark and dangerous. The exorcism-as-a-business-opportunity reminded of Jonathan Stroud’s recent Lockwood & Co. series. And the atmosphere and setting as a whole were unique and enthralling.

The Winter Horses by Philip Kerr

Sep20

Historical fiction set in the Ukraine, winter, 1941. Or is it magical realism? The horses featured in the story are very, very intelligent, crafty, and communicative. Then, there’s the question of whether this book is middle grade fiction or young adult. The main character, a Jewish girl named Kalinka, is young, maybe twelve or thirteen? But a lot of what happens in this World War II-setting novel is very, very dark. I don’t exactly know how to classify this book, and that ambiguity in being able to pigeon-hole the book into “YA Holocaust novel” or “middle grade horse book” or “magical horse story” or something else makes it that much more intriguing to me.

Kalinka’s entire family has been annihilated by the Nazis. Max, the wildlife manager at Aksaniya-Nova wildlife preserve, is pretending to cooperate with the Germans so that he can protect the animals he loves, especially the rare and wild Przewalski’s horses. As Kalinka forms a bond with the horses out on the snowy plains where they live, Max forms a plan to save both Kalinka and the horses from the German soldiers who have been ordered to wipe out both the Jews and the ancient breed of Przewalski’s.

The style of writing in this novel comes across as very Russian (Ukrainian?) to me. The writing is rather simple and unadorned, and Max’s philosophy of “live and let live” and “persevere to fight another day” strikes me as typical of a Ukrainian peasant, at least the Ukrainian peasants I’ve read about in Russian novels. Something about the way the book is written, the characters, and the descriptions made me eel as if I were in Ukraine in the winter of 1941, watching the events unfold. Even when the events that unfold are borderline unbelievable (a horse that counts and strategizes?), I wanted to believe. And when the plot turned to harsh, violent, and tragic, I wanted to close my eyes and disbelieve that things like genocide, animal cruelty, bombings, and attempted cannibalism really could happen. But those latter things, the ones I wished weren’t at all possible, were the ones that did happen, and probably still are happening.

I would recommend this book for older teens who can handle the horrors and can yet still suspend disbelief long enough to believe in a semi-happy ending.

Kalinka’s (nick)name comes from an old Russian song by composer and folklorist Ivan Petrovich Larionov:

And here’s a short video about Przewalski’s horses:

The Hero’s Guide to Being an Outlaw by Christopher Healy

Sep19

Pirates! Pirates! PIRATES!!

OK, now that I’ve got your attention, the new League of Princes book by Christopher Healy, third in the series, does indeed have pirates. It also has all my favorite characters: Liam the Bold, Gustav the Great, Frederic the Fussy, and Duncan the Village Idiot (my names, and I love Duncan the best). The women in the story—Snow, Ella, Lila, and Rapunzel–escape from prison, form their own league (The Ferocious Female Freedom Fighters, or ffff!), and do a lot better than the guys at defeating Evil. There are also a a couple of new female characters who may be my favorites so far: Jerica the Pirate(!) and Val Jeanval, who assaulted a dozen royal soldiers with a stale, stolen baguette.

I must have a somewhat juvenile sense of humor because I really like these ridiculous fractured fairy tales from Christopher Healy, Chronicler of Heroic Shenanigans. These heroes correct each other’s grammar! They argue over who goes first, the guy or the girl when it comes to rescuing or taking out the villain! They are quite easily distracted by definitions of words and questions of grooming and sartorial style. They are persistent and brave, usually in the wrong direction, at the wrong time, and without a good plan. They find a genie and make stupid, useless wishes! They are wanted for murder in thirteen kingdoms! They use lots of exclamation marks!

I like the humor in these books because it’s silly, wordish, and slapstick without descending to gross-out, crude, or nasty. The characters do a lot of misunderstanding each other’s words with farcical results that are just a step or two above Amelia Bedelia. They stumble all over themselves and each other while attempting to be heroes and heroines. They stop to have useless and entertaining discussions about the plural of “mongoose” and about how people fit those tiny model ships into bottles. Read the first two books first: The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom and The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle. Then, make your way carefully and speedily to The Hero’s Guide to Being an Outlaw, where you will find:

Outlaws! In-laws! Mongeese! (or mongooses?) A fake Royal Foot Massagers Society! ffff! A Djinn from the realm of Baribunda! The legendary Jade Djinn Gem! Jelly, jelly dragonfruit and ginger sandwiches! Captain Euphustus Baileywimple! Sketchy bartenders, salty-tongued sailors, and grime-coated anglers! Pin-striped soldiers! and Pirates! Pirates! PIRATES!! (since it is Talk Like a Pirate Day—Ahoy, matey!)

Minion by John David Anderson

Sep18

Superheroes have sidekicks, and super-villains have minions. But what happens when a minion meets a sidekick and they both go up against a super-super villain?

Something like that anyway. If you like the style of a hard-boiled detective novel or a comic book novelization, lots of short sentences and sentence fragments, wise guys spouting off with trite aphorisms and odd metaphors spilling all over the place, you’ll enjoy Minion as well as its companion novel Sidekicked. For example:

“There are those moments in your life, you know, when the last screw is tightened and the green light flashes and you realize that your whole worldview is a loose thread dangling from the blanket you’ve wrapped so tight around you. And somebody’s gotten ahold of that one thread and is starting to pull. And most of you wants to tug back. To stay warm. To stay safe. To keep things as they are.”

“I get that same strange feeling that I got the last time we sat together. That feeling of rightness. Not rightness opposite of wrongness. Rightness like putting on a favorite pair of jeans. Maybe Dad’s right. Maybe normal’s not so bad.”

Michael Morn is a minion: he robs banks and helps his dad make black boxes full of technology for the mob. But Michael isn’t really a bad guy. He just finds it difficult to distinguish between “what’s right and what’s best and why there even has to be a difference.”

He’s not alone in his confusion. All of the characters in the book seem to be somewhat morally ambiguous. The police are inept at best and in the pay of the bad guys at the worst. The superhero who comes to town, The Comet, doesn’t want to show his face and fails to acknowledge the help of his sidekick. Michael’s dad is a criminal and a thief, but he sacrifices safety and money for his son on several occasions. Michael himself can’t decide whether he’s a “good guy” or a “bad guy”, and by the end of the book he’s still undecided.

If you can deal with the ambiguity and the comic book writing style, Minion is a good read. It’s upper middle grade, maybe even young adult, with some middle school romance and a few crude words (not many). Plus the aforesaid moral ambiguity.

Parched by Georgia Clark

Sep17

“Post-apocalyptic fiction is set in a world or civilization after . . . a disaster that ruins the world. Possible apocalyptic disasters include nuclear warfare, pandemic, extraterrestrial attack, impact event, cybernetic revolt, technological singularity, dysgenics, supernatural phenomena, divine judgment, climate change, resource depletion or some other general disaster.”

“A dystopia is a community or society that is in some important way undesirable or frightening. It is the opposite of a utopia. Dystopias are often characterized by dehumanization, totalitarian governments, environmental disaster, or other characteristics associated with a cataclysmic decline in society.”

Obviously there is/can be some overlap here. Hunger Games is dystopian fiction, but it is hinted that some apocalyptic disaster caused the government of Panem to become what it was. Divergent also falls into this in between category, with most of the emphasis being on the uncovering of the dystopia underneath the seeming utopia of future Chicago. Parched is both post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction.

Disaster: fifty years of climate change leading to world wide drought and a severe shortage of water.

Ostensible utopia that is actually a dystopia: Eden, a city enclosed by white walls and a clear protective dome under which water is kept for the exclusive benefit of the Edenites. Outside Eden is the Badlands where millions live in violent anarchy with a growing shortage of water.

Government: authoritarian, led by a dictator named Gyan and a group of functionaries called the Trust.

Hero/heroine: Sixteen year old Tessendra Rockwood, an Edenite who, because of the tragic accident that killed her mother, has left the protective environment she grew up in to live in the Badlands outside the city.

Rebel group: Kudzu, a group of teens who are determined to change their world by means of non-violent resistance.

Technology: Eden is highly technological with robots called “substitutes” that perform most of the menial labor in the city, and the development of artificial intelligence is on the horizon for the scientists of Eden. Inhabitants of the Badlands exist on the edges of civilization, using primitive low-tech weapons and the cast-off technology of Eden to survive.

I thought Parched was well-written and solid in its world-building and characterizations. I did figure out one of the two major “reveals’ in the book before they were revealed, but I’m not sure every reader would. And sometimes Tess acts sixteen year old dumb while at other times she is brave, strong, and skilled way beyond her years. If the “border crisis” in Parched is meant to mirror and comment on the current border crisis in the U.S., it’s eerily prescient since the book was published in March of this year just before the border crisis began to dominate the news in mid-summer.

There is teen romance in Parched (no triangle, thank goodness), but it’s an interesting and somewhat restrained romance. There is some mild bad language, which could have have been left out, but unfortunately wasn’t. The language, violence, theme of rebellion against a repressive government, and romance make this one firmly YA, although both younger and older readers who like Orleans by Sherri Smith or Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities would also like Parched.

A Month of Sundays by Ruth White

Sep15

“Is it true what Aunt June says, that everything happens for a reason?”

It’s a key question, and A Month of Sundays, true to the times in which we live, does not presume to give an answer to the question. However the book does presume to raise the right question(s), and for that reason alone, Ms. White deserves kudos.

April Garnet Rose and her mother were deserted by Garnet’s dad before she was born, and now when she finds out that her mother is planning to move to Florida to look for work and a place to live, leaving her behind until things get settled, Garnet feels hurt, abandoned, and furious. Garnet doesn’t even know Aunt June, her father’s sister, who has agreed to take care of her in Virginia while her mother is looking for a job. Then, Garnet finds out that Aunt June believes everything happens for a reason and that April Garnet has come to help her in her search for God.

A Month of Sundays is a short book, 168 pages, and it takes place over a short period of time, a little over a month, but a lot happens in that time. Garnet and Aunt June visit a few different churches and a revival service, searching for God.

Aunt June: “You came here to help me find God. I’ve been searching for him for months now. . . I try a different church every week. Yesterday I was at Big Branch, and last week I went to Little Prater. Now I’ll have you to go with me and help.”

They see people speaking in tongues and handling snakes and preaching and singing. Garnet falls for a preacher boy. But Garnet and her aunt stay on the periphery of the church, observers rather than participants, until Aunt June gets a miracle. Then, Garnet experiences her own miracle—and a tragedy.

I thought it was a good little story, presented in a way that respected the beliefs of various sects without endorsing them. Young readers will be left to make up their own minds about snake-handling and speaking in tongues and faith healing and God. It was a little odd that no one really thought they had “found God” by the end of the book, at least not the Christian God of the Bible. But maybe that’s not who they were looking for in the first place.

The Green Glass Sea by Ellen Klages

Sep10

I didn’t know until the very end of this book what the title “the green glass sea” meant, but it turned out to be an appropriate name for a particularly enjoyable book. The Green Glass Sea was the winner of the 2007 Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, an award presented to a children’s or young adult book published in English by a U.S. publisher and set in the Americas. I certainly concur with the award committee and with several reviewers who liked the book a lot, including Kelly at Big A Little a, Bookshelves of Doom, and Betsy Bird at Fuse #8 (that last review is where I think I heard about this book and put it on my TBR list several years ago.)

Published in 2006, the book’s setting is World War II, 1943-1945, in Los Alamos, NM. I learned a lot, painlessly, about the Manhattan Project and the background to the development of the atomic bomb just from reading this book. I didn’t know that Los Alamos didn’t even appear on the map during the mid-1940’s, and that the project was such a secret that the scientists who were working on it had to live in a place called the Hill (Los Alamos). In the book kids and adults were told, “Off the Hill, you can’t tell anyone where you live, or who you live with, or what you see or hear.”

The setting and the characters drive the plot in this rather quiet story about an eleven year old girl, Dewe Kerrigan, who comes to I’ve with her scientist father on the Hill. Dewey is delighted to live in this math and science town as she gets to question famous scientists such as Enrico Fermi and Dick Feynman and scour the town dump for cast-offs for her mechanical projects built out of spare parts and ingenuity. However, Dewey’s scientific and mechanical interests make her something of a misfit with the other children in Los Alamos who call her “Screwy Dewy,” and when tragedy strikes, Dewey is not sure where she can turn for help.

The author makes some odd choices about verb tenses. The book starts out in third person, but told from Dewey’s point of view, in present tense, and continues that way for the first 37 pages. Then, it switches to third person, another girl named Suze’s point of view, past tense. The story alternates between Suze’s thoughts and feelings and Dewey’s, staying in past tense. Then later in the book, the author throws in a couple of pages here and there where we’re watching Dewey again, and her story is told in present tense again. I’m not sure what the point was. Maybe someone else can explain?

Such a great story, though. Dewey, and later the other main character, Suze, are very real characters with quirks and changes in attitude and demeanor throughout the book. There is some cursing in the dialogue in the book, which may bother some young readers, but it wasn’t overdone, just enough to be true to the times and the atmosphere. Suze’s mother smokes like a fiend, and the adults all indulge in the occasional beer or other alcoholic beverage of choice, again very true to life. I enjoyed getting to know all of the characters in this book, and I didn’t want it to end. So I’m glad to find out that there’s a sequel called White Sands, Red Menace. Dewey is a young lady I really want to know more.

Oh, and by the way, I loved the ending—very realistic in the characters’ obliviousness to the import of the news they hear on the radio about some place in Japan called Hiroshima.

Always Emily by Michaela MacColl

Sep9

Last year I read Michaela MacColl’s Nobody’s Secret, a mystery story for young adults set in Amherst, Massachusetts, 1846, and featuring a young Emily Dickinson as the protagonist and sleuth. MacColl’s latest novel, Always Emily, features a different literary Emily, Emily Bronte and her sister Charlotte as a mismatched but effective detective duo.

Emily and Charlotte are as different in character, personality, and appearance as it is possible for two sisters to be. On the first page of the novel the family is at a funeral. Charlotte sat “stiffly, her back perfectly straight.” Emily “fidgeted unconscionably.” Charlotte is later portrayed as bossy, prim, near-sighted and anxious. Emily, on the other hand, is wild, independent, outspoken, and undisciplined. The two sisters share only three things: a passionate nature, inquisitive intelligence, and a love for writing.

The two young women, ages 17 and 19 in the book, squabble and argue incessantly. And yet they manage to work together to solve a mystery and bring a miscreant to justice. I was impressed with the author’s ability to bring these two famous writers to life, along with their sometimes chaotic home life. The youngest Bronte sister, Anne, doesn’t play a part in Always Emily; she’s away on a visit. But their father the Reverend Bronte is very much present, as an indulgent father and a socially concerned pastor and counselor. The Bronte brother, Branwell, is already headed toward a weak and dissolute life in this story. And Tabitha, the young ladies’ Yorkshire cook, servant, and substitute mother-figure, rounds out the cast of characters who live in the Bronte household.

The mystery itself was somewhat slight, but it served as a vehicle for the characters to shine. Fans of the Brontes will enjoy the book, and some readers might become fans after reading about the two fiery and independent Bronte sisters. For a biography of the Brontes, try The Bronte Sisters: The Brief Lives of Charlotte, Emily and Anne by Catherine Reef, a Cybils finalist from last year. For more Bronte-related fiction, I recommend The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke. Ms. Clarkeâ€™s fantasy about the Brontesâ€™ toy soldiers who come to life and try to return to the Bronte home in Yorkshire won the Carnegie Medal in 1962 (British title: The Twelve and the Genii). Of course, if you’re interested in direct exposure to the Bronte sisters, Emily and Charlotte, I also recommend either Wuthering Heights or Jane Eyre, if you haven’t already read both. Like the sisters themselves, the two books are quite different, but each one is insightful and appealing in its own way.

Semicolon

Books we must have though we lack bread.

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