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.
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.
A not-too-compelling entry in the Christian horror-dystopia-weird creatures genre.
I dunno. If you like stories about supernatural creatures but want to keep your reading theologically borderline sound and sexually pure (those vampire/zombie stories get nasty sometimes), then this debut novel from Thomas Nelson Publishers might fit the bill. I found the idea of nephilim who are half angel/half human a bit hard to swallow. It’s based on Genesis 6, the story of how “the sons of God” married “the daughters of men” and had children who were “giants.”
The nephilim in Spirit Fighter are not giants, and they’re not all half angel, but rather some are only one quarter angel. Jonah and his sister Eliza find out that their mother is a nepilim, the daughter of a human mother and a fallen angel, at the same time that they find out that Mom has been kidnapped by fallen angels. The evil demons believe that Jonah’s mom will “come over to the dark side” and be very powerful in defeating the plans of Elohim, as they call God, because of her nephilim heritage.
Guided by a guardian angel and empowered with special gifts as a result of their own 1/4 angel heritage, Jonah and Eliza go to New York to rescue mom. This book is the first in the Son of Angels: Jonah Stone series.
Tagline: “Your mom always said you were an angel, what if she was right?”
I liked the second book better than I did the first, I think. Children who like puzzles and magic tricks would really find this book and its prequel, Horten’s Miraculous Mechanisms, quite compelling.
I just wanted more character development, more reasons to like or at least sympathize with the children in the two stories. Stuart is short, curious, and persistent. The triplets are annoying, and I had trouble telling them apart, even though I get the names attached in print. I couldn’t remember which one was which, so they all three felt annoying.
The puzzles are good and appropriate for ten and eleven year olds—which is not to say that I could have solved them myself. Sometimes it takes a child to solve a child’s puzzle. Anyway, for budding magicians and illusionists, Horten’s two books (so far) would be the perfect summer, or anytime, read.
Lucy Scarborough is seventeen, in her senior year of high school, with a handsome and likable date to the prom, a best friend with whom she can share all her secrets, and foster parents who love her dearly. Her life seems near-perfect. However, seventeen was the age of Lucy’s mother Miranda, when she had a baby girl and then went mad. A family curse passed down from mother to daughter in unbroken line seems far-fetched, impossible, but Lucy might have to believe in the impossible to break the curse.
I’m a Simon and Garfunkel fan from way back, so of course I enjoyed the fact that this folk tale translated into the present was based on the old folk tune, Parsley, Sage Rosemary and Thyme (Scarborough Fair), even if the lyrics are changed up a bit from the version I knew.
Here’s a performance by Hayley Westenra of Celtic Women:
The book puts a rather dark interpretation on this old song: Lucy must perform the tasks in the song so that she can free herself and her family from the Elfin King’s curse. The penalty if she is not successful: insanity and captivity under the Elfin King’s sway.
The characters and their actions and reactions in this story were a bit off-kilter; they reminded me of some of Madeleine L’Engle’s characters and plots, not quite believable or convincing in their actions. It’s not the fantasy parts of the novel that I didn’t find probable but rather the characters’ reactions to the improbable situation in which they find themselves. Would you plow a beach with a goat’s horn, even if you did believe in an age-old curse on your family?
Still, there was something endearing about Lucy and her family and friends and their willingness to fight together against the curse. Just as the characters in L’Engle’s novels “fight against the night” in ways that stretch credibility but also enrich the imagination, Lucy makes a stand in her own way and refuses to give in to the Elfin King.
Solid Young Adult fiction for the readers of vampire tales and dark ghost stories and borderline horror.
For my Cybils judging responsibilities this year I read 84 of the 151 books nominated. I still have more that I would like to read in the next couple of months. Of those 84, these are my twelve favorites:
Princess Academy Palace of Stone by Shannon Hale. The only one of these favorites I didn’t get around to reviewing, but it’s Shannon Hale and it’s wonderful. I closed the book at the end with a happy and satisfied sigh.
The shortlists of Cybils finalists for 2012 in all of the categories are posted today at the Cybils website. Take a look and add to your reading list from these well-written, high kid-appeal books for young adults and children–all published between November 2011 and October 2012.
Young Adult Fiction: Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow.
Adult Fiction: Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Since everybody and her dog was recommending this psychological thriller, I decided to read it. It was intelligent, well-plotted, psychologically astute, crude, profane, and ultimately repellent. The ending was especially disturbing. Call of Duty by Charles Todd.
Nonfiction: From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart: Rekindling My Love for Catholicism by Chris Haw. Gray Matter, A Neurosurgeon Discovers the Power of Prayer . . . One Patient at a Time by David Levy, with Joel Kilpatrick.
