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Love, Chickens, and a Taste of Peculiar Cake by Joyce Magnin

Jun27

I would like to bake Penny a cake. A fullness of time cake. Chocolate with chocolate frosting, rich and full. ~from Wilma Sue’s notebook

Wilma Sue has come from Miss Daylily’s Home for Children to live with retired missionary sisters, Naomi and Ruth Beedlemeyer. Her caseworker warns her, “Just one infraction and back you go to the orphanage.” Can Wilma Sue manage to behave herself, tame her imagination, and trust the sisters? Will the sisters trust her, or will they betray her trust and believe the lies that other people tell about Wilma Sue? And what is the secret ingredient that makes Ruth’s cakes that she bakes for all the neighbors, so very special—almost magical?

This middle grade novel pokes along rather slowly at first, but the pace picks up toward the middle. And there’s a slam-bang, suspenseful finish. Wilma Sue is an endearing character, as are the missionary sisters from Malawi with whom she comes to live. Ruth bakes special cakes for those who need an extra touch of grace or compassion or just plain neighborliness. Naomi stays busy volunteering at the homeless shelter and with various other charities. Wilma Sue’s job is to feed the chickens. As the story progresses, Wilma Sue forms a bond with these rather peculiar and unorthodox sisters, as she tries to figure out just what it is that makes the cakes that Ruth bakes so magical and what gives them healing properties.

There was something small and winsome and charming about this story. I became involved in the plight and the journey of Wilma Sue, almost in spite of myself, just as Wilma Sue is beguiled into the lives of the sisters. Oh, and Ruth sings hymns as she bakes her cakes. How could I resist?

From Joyce Magnin’s blog: “Children are still willing to believe in magic even though they know it’s not real. I hope that through the use of magic in my books children will also learn something about faith. Because what is faith but believing in things unseen.”

I am, by the way, a litle confused about the title of this book. I read it the way I have it in my post title: Love, Chickens and a Taste of Peculiar Cake. Amazon has it as Cake: Love, Chickens and a Taste of Peculiar. Ms. Magnin just calls the book “Cake” at her blog, so maybe Amazon is right. But I think I prefer my syntax, maybe.

Cake: Love, Chickens and a Taste of Peculiar or Love, Chickens, and a Taste of Peculiar Cake is shortlisted for the INSPY, Literature for Young People award.

Orleans by Sherri Smith

Jun26

Ms. Smith, who wrote the acclaimed historical fiction novel, Flygirl, enters the wold of dystopian fiction with her new (2013) novel, Orleans. The book is set in the future, sometime after the year 2025, after seven ferocious hurricanes have pounded the Gulf coast, after those hurricanes and Delta Fever, a deadly virus, have decimated the population, and after the United States has turned itself into two separate countries: the quarantined Delta Coast and the rest of the U.S., The Outer States, with a Wall in between and no travel between the two.

Fen de la Guerre is an OP (blood type O-positive). The people who are left in the Delta Coast, in the city of Orleans, live in tribal groups according to blood type, because the Delta Fever is somehow more deadly when it crosses blood type, or maybe because some blood types prey on others for transfusions that keep them alive for a while. (I never did quite follow the virus/blood type/transfusion connection.) Anyway, Fen’s tribe is attacked a bunch of AB’s, and Fen ends up with an orphaned baby that she has promised to somehow smuggle to a better life.

Enter Daniel, a scientist from the Outer States, who is working on a cure for Delta Fever. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have his cure quite perfected yet, and he needs to do research in Orleans itself, despite the dangers of life in the Delta Coast. Daniel and Fen meet, under less than ideal circumstances, as captives about to be drained of their blood by a group of kidnappers/blood sellers. They become allies and help each other escape, and so the story goes on. Will Daniel find a cure for Delta Fever? Will Fen be able to save the baby girl with whom she’s been entrusted? Will the perils of the Delta claim both of their lives before they can accomplish anything or even really trust each other?

The setting is a little bit like Paolo Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities, “a world destroyed and reconfigured by climate change and the greed of oil hungry corporations and industries.” But I don’t think Sherri Smith’s book is really derivative as much as coincidentally similar, and I really liked Orleans better than I did the award-winning Ship Breaker. I have to use the H-word in explanation and say that although it deserves the moniker “dystopian”, Orleans is ultimately just more hopeful than Bacigalupi’s series. And I do like a dose of hope.

However, don’t expect too much goodness and light in this mostly grim world of deadly disease and blood feuds. The ending is ambiguous, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a sequel to Orleans someday, if the publishing gods and Ms. Smith see fit to continue the story. I’d give it a read if they did.

Recommended for fans of dystopian fiction and Southern fiction, especially if a combination of the two genres sounds good to you.

The Hero’s Guide to Storming the Castle by Christopher Healy

Jun3

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!”

Beholding Bee by Kimberley Newton Fusco

May17

I reviewed Ms. Fusco’s book, The Wonder of Charlie Anne, a couple of years ago, and I enjoyed reading it. This novel, Beholding Bee, set during World War II in the northeastern U.S.(Ohio, Illinois), tells a good story, too. Bee is a feisty girl who learns over the course of the novel to stand up for herself and persevere—lessons we could all afford to learn and re-learn.

“When you have a diamond shining on your face, you have rules about things.

First you keep it hidden. There is a hose outside every place where we hook up because we need water to run our traveling show. Pauline and I keep a bucket and a sponge in the back of our hauling truck. Water from a hose is cold as cherry Popsicles, but if you let the bucket sit in the sun all day it heats up, and at night Pauline pours out her apple shampoo and we take turns washing our hair.

Pauline has a big towel and she wraps my hair and then combs it out and I don’t yell out much because she is mostly gentle. Then she braids my hair, and when it dries she lets it loose and it falls all soft in twists and curls and hides the diamond on my cheek. Because when you have a jewel on your face, some days you might not want to show everyone who feels like looking.”

Bee, an orphan, is forced to learn to depend on her own strength and imagination when the adults in her life, Pauline and Bobby, desert her. She has “two aunts”, Mrs. Swift and Mrs. Potter, wwho take her into their house and take care of her, but they’re very old. And no one else other than Bee can see them.

The idea of the two old ladies from the past that no one else can see is a little odd and even disconcerting. But it made the story more interesting and in a way more believable than it would have been if Bee was living just alone in an abandoned house.

I liked the lesson Bee learns about how unsatisfying revenge can be, and I liked the fact that Bee and her friends pray together for a friend’s father who is away in the war. None of the story is preachy or overtly Christian, but it felt good and grounded in Biblical principles. Bee learns the things she needs to learn from each of the adults in her life. From Pauline, she learns to read and do math, and about the stars and nature and all sorts of practical life lessons. Bobby teaches her to run and to spit. Her friend Ruth Ellen teaches her empathy, and Ruth Ellen’s mother serves as a surrogate mother and counselor to Bee. Her teacher, Miss Healy, teaches her that school can be a good, safe place, and other students teach Bee to recognize her won strengths and draw on her own inner resources.

Beholding Bee is just a good solid story, mostly realistic with a bit of fantasy thrown in for spice.

Failstate by John W. Otte

Apr21

“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.

The Drowned Vault by N.D. Wilson

Apr16

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.

Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker

Apr7

Living a Lie Comes With a Price.

This thriller is book with a moral, but it didn’t feel preachy to me, just real. Three teens–Cooper, Hiro, and Gordy—witness a robbery and attempted murder. Because Cooper and his family are threatened by the robbers and because they have reason to believe that at least one of the robbers might be a bad cop, the three decide on a”code of silence.” They won’t tell anyone about what they saw: not their parents, not their teachers, not their other friends, and not the police.

The rest of the story show the outworking and results of this decision. Although the moral of the story is “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”, it’s never presented as an easy option. The truth is that it’s not always easy to tell the truth. And our motives for many of our decisions are often mixed at best. If I lie to protect myself and others, is it mostly for myself or the others? If I tell one lie, will it become easier and easier to tell more lies? Why do people lie, and how hard is it to disentangle oneself from a web of lies? What do lies told to others do to the trust between the friends who share in the deception?

Hiro is a little too hard on Cooper sometimes throughout the book. She rails at him over and over to end the code of silence before it destroys their friendship and puts them in the very danger they’re trying to avoid. But she agreed to the code in the first place, and she can end it anytime. Instead, she blames Cooper and tries to make him feel totally responsible for the trio’s joint decision. That aspect of the relationships in the novel felt wrong to me, somehow.

But overall, Code of Silence was an exciting middle grade novel that asked all the right questions—and gave some solid answers.

There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones

Apr6

The INSPY Awards are blogger-initiated book awards for fictional literature that grapples with expressions of the Christian faith. The awards were given in several categories in 2011, including the category of “literature for young people”, and I got to be judge in that category. The INSPY Awards took a break in 2012, but they’re back this year. And the list below is the “long list” of nominated books in the Literature for Young People category for this time around:

Wreath by Judy Christie
With a Name Like Love by Tess Hilmo. Semicolon review here.
Thundersnow by Sheila Hollinghead
Dead Man’s Hand by Eddie Jones
There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones
Crazy Dangerous by Andrew Klavan. Semicolon review here.
Cake – Love, Chickens and a Taste of Peculiar by Joyce Magnin
Right Where I Belong by Krista McGee
The Embittered Ruby by Nicole O’Dell
The Shadowed Onyx by Nicole O’Dell
Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker
Addison Blakely: Confessions of a PK by Betsy St. Amant
Temptation: Solitary Tales No. 3 by Travis Thrasher
How to Save a Life by Sara Zarr

Three of the books on the list I’ve already read and reviewed, as indicated. Actually, I read How To Save a Life by Sara Zarr, and I thought I reviewed it but can’t find the review anywhere. I liked all three very much. I read a couple more of the books on this long list this past week: There You’ll Find Me by Jenny B. Jones and Code of Silence by Tim Shoemaker (review coming soon).

Ms. Jones is a rather prolific author of teen romances for Christian girls. Her books were all over Lifeway last time I was there. I rad one of her other books a year or two ago and thought it was just “meh.” This one was fairly low on the scale, too, and would have received a complete pan, were it not for the setting: Ireland.

Finley Sinclair, daughter of a wealthy hotel magnate, and sister to Will whose death in a terrorist incident has put Finley’s life in a tailspin of grief, is headed for Ireland to spend a year studying and trying to reconnect with God. Will came to love and know God when he studied in Ireland, and Finley hopes to follow in his footsteps, literally by visiting all of the places Will wrote about in his travel journal. Color Finley grey: grief-stricken, questioning, recovering from a mental breakdown, and lost.

Enter Beckett Rush, teen heart-throb, Hollywood player and bad boy, and star of a series of vampire movies. He’s in Ireland to film the latest movie in the Steel Markov vampire franchise. Beckett and Finley meet on the plane, clash, and hope never to see one another again. Alas, predictably, they are destined to meet again, clash again, and eventually fall in love and live happily ever after.

OK, it’s not quite that cliche. Take away the “live happily ever after.” Beckett and especially Finley are dealing with way too many issues to have a traditional happy ending. Beckett has a pushy dad who doubles as his greedy manager. Finley has mental health issues, a grouchy school assignment, and the loss of her faith, as well as the afore-mentioned grief and Beckett to keep her busy and confused.

As I think about it, this book would have made a good K-drama: Finley falls asleep on Beckett’s shoulder and drools, the two feud but are thrown together in spite of themselves, there’s a group of nasty, jealous girls at school, Finley has a sidekick, Erin, whom she mentors, lots of K-drama tropes. An awkward kiss or two, change the nationalities and the setting of the novel, take out the God-talk, and it would work on Korean TV just fine. In fact, it would work better on screen and with some editing.

I probably wouldn’t have made it through this one, though, if it hadn’t been set in Ireland. Give me a vivid setting, and I’ll follow you anywhere. And I got to read parts of the dialogue with an Irish lilt inside my head. A good plot and some engaging characters would have helped the journey, however.

Other reviews in which the blogger thought it was just peachy (I may be in the minority on this one): Edgy Inspirational Romance, YA Books Central, Christian Novels, Tree Swing Reading, etc.

Mira’s Diary: Lost in Paris by Marissa Moss

Feb1

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.

Middle Grade Fantasy and Science Fiction: What’s In, What’s Out

Jan27

Some observations from my Cybils reading:

What’s In
Clockwork/mechanical animals, birds, monsters, objects, steam-punk: The Dead Gentleman by Matthew Cody, The Peculiar by Stefan Bachmann, Above World by Jenn Reese, The Brightworking by Paul B. Thompson, Goblin Secrets by William Alexander.

Ghosts: Tilly’s Moonlight Garden by Julia Green, The Whispering House by Rebecca Wade, A Greyhound of a Girl by Roddy Doyle, 13 Hangmen by Art Corriveau, The Mapmaker and the Ghost by Sarvenaz Tash, On the Day I Died by Candace Fleming, The Ghost of Graylock by Dan Poblocki.

Time travel: Caught by Margaret Peterson Haddix, Horten’s Miraculous Mechanisms: Magic, Mystery and a Very Strange Adventure by Lissa Evans, A Mutiny in Time by James Dashner, 13 Hangmen by Art Corriveau, Time Snatchers by Richard Ungar, The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman, The Dead Gentleman by Matthew Cody, Mira’s Diary: Lost in Paris by Marissa Moss, Beswitched by Kate Saunders, The Time-Traveling Fashionista at the Palace of Marie Antionette by Bianca Turetsky.

Portals to other worlds: My Very Unfairy Tale Life by Anna Staniszewski, The Dead Gentleman by Matthew Cody, The Peculiar by Stefan Bachmann, Storybound by Marissa Burt, Iron-Hearted Violet by Kelly Barnhill, Horten’s Incredible Illusions by Lissa Evans, The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There by Catherynne M. Valente, Winterling by Sarah Prineas, Summer and Bird by Katherine Catmull.

Fairy tale re-tellings: Snow in Summer by Jane Yolen, Whatever After: The Fairest of Them All by Sarah Mylnowski, Twice Upon a Time: Beauty and the Beast by Wendy Mass, In a Glass Grimmly by Adam Gidwitz, Iron-Hearted Violet by Kelly Barnhill, The Cup and the Crown by Diane Stanley, My Very Unfairy Tale Life by Anna Staniszewski, Twice Upon a Time by James Riley, The Sinister Sweetness of Splendid Academy by Nikki Loftin, Seeing Cinderella by Jenny Lundquist, The Hero’s Guide to Saving Your Kingdom by Christopher Healy, The Hop by Sharelle Moranville, The Book of Wonders by Jasmine Richards.

Orphans and street urchins: Orphans are always in season. The Dead Gentleman by Matthew Cody, Time Snatchers by Richard Ungar, Splendors and Glooms by Laura Amy Schlitz, Goblin Secrets by William Alexander, The False Prince by Jennifer A. Nielsen, Storybound by Marissa Burt, Winterling by Sarah Prineas, The Spy Princess by Sherwood Smith, The Book of Wonders by Jasmine Richards, Earwig and the Witch by Diana Wynne Jones, The Rock of Ivanore by Laurissa White Reyes, Sword Mountain by Nancy Yi Fan, Deadweather and Sunrise by Geoff Rodkey,, The Voyage of Lucy P. Simmons by Babara Mariconda, The Fire Chronicle by John Stephens, Circus Galacticus by Deva Fagan.

Talking animals and talking animal worlds: Neversink by Barry Wolverton (Arctic birds), The Secret of the Ginger Mice by Frances Watts (mice), The Hop by Sharelle Moranville (toads), Wings of Fire: The Dragonet Prophecy by Tui Sutherland (dragons), The Last Dragonslayer by Jasper Fforde (dragon), The Prince Who Fell from the Sky by John Claude Bemis (bears, wolves, and others), Sword Mountain by Nancy Yi Fan (birds of prey), Mr. and Mrs. Bunny: Detectives Extraordinaire! by Mrs. Bunny and Polly Horvath (rabbits and others), Darkbeast by Morgan Keyes (ravens, rats, and snakes), Signed by Zelda by Kate Feiffer (pigeons), Malcolm at Midnight by W.H. Beck (rats), The High-Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate by Scott Nash (birds).

What’s Out
Space Travel: The Prince Who Fell from the Sky by John Claude Bemis sort of fits into this genre, but it’s really more about a journey with talking animals through a dystopian future world. Gary Schmidt’s What Came from the Stars is more of a high fantasy combined with an encounter between good and evil than it is about exploring outer space. Circus Galacticus by Deva Fagan is the only real space travel book of the lot that I can remember.

Zombies and vampires: Maybe the zombie/vampire fad is still going strong in YA, but in Middle Grade fantasy/science fiction, I only remember a couple of books with zombies or vampires, The Dead Gentleman by Matthew Cody and Benjamin Franklinstein Meets Thomas Deadison by Matthew McElligott and Larry Tuxbury.