Long Awaited Reads Month

So, I did this, or my own version of it. I have so much to choose from, with books that I own that I want to read. I have a shelf full of them. I need to weed it. I'm in a weeding mood. I've historically been extremely reluctant to weed my own shelves, though, so we'll see how that goes.

But the thing is, on those shelves are a number of things that I keep putting off because for whatever reason, something else always seems more pressing. January, as Long Awaited Reads Month (thanks to Ana and Iris) was the perfect time to forget more pressing and just go with what I knew I could love.

Here's how I did:

Men at Arms by Terry Pratchett
A Sand County Almanac and Essays from Round River by Aldo Leopold
Disco for the Departed by Colin Cotterill
Terrier by Tamora Peirce

That doesn't count me starting Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White, which I abandoned around page 70 for the third time in my life because ffs, Walter Hartright. And I also read Susan Dennard's Truthwitch, which can't be a LAR because it was released this month, except that it kind of felt like the book I've been waiting for so I'm going to count it for a half point.

That's 4.5 books. In one month. That's amazing for me these days. It turns out reading books that fit like a comfortable pair of jeans helps me read more. And when I read more, I feel better about myself. So even though I have been as sick as possible without hospitalization this month - still coughing up goo and feeling exhausted five weeks in - I can't count this month as a total wash; I read some wonderful, wonderful books.

I'll do little mini reviews because that's as much as I'm up to at this moment, but I may have more to say about each of these books as time goes on.

Men at Arms: It's been a long time since I read a Discworld book. Too long, really. Plus it's a Night Watch novel, and I love the Night Watch. I read it in two days and it was the perfect way to start my reading year. Amazing how relevant Pratchett seems to be, no matter when he wrote the book.

A Sand County Almanac: Putting my thoughts together on this one is going to be hard. Good thing I took notes. It was brilliant, the best thing I've read this month, and that's saying something. It was also the longest awaited of the long awaited books. I think I first heard of it when I was doing my undergrad and that is longer ago than I care to admit. It's surprisingly easy to read, given how dense it gets sometimes; the Almanac section is beautiful but regrettably short, the essays from Round River are deep and thought-provoking. Another book that is startlingly, and sadly, as relevant now as it was when it was written... which was the 1940s.

Disco for the Departed: I can't believe how long it took me to get to this. I've had it home from the library at least four or five times, and never made it past the first couple of pages before it was due, entirely because of reading other things. Wonderful to be back in 1970s Laos with Dr. Siri. I'll go anywhere with Dr. Siri. One of my favourite characters of all time. Cotterill's writing remains just stellar and the characterization excellent.

Terrier: Oh Tamora Pierce. If Robin McKinley started my life-long love of fantasy, Tamora Pierce's Alanna cemented it. But I haven't read much of her since that series, and Terrier has kind of called to me, since it was published. The first time I tried to read it I stumbled on some of the formatting stuff - different fonts for different prologue journals and I didn't like the fonts, which is a stupid reason not to read a book - but once I got past that this time I was in for good. Beka Cooper is fantastic and Pierce's sense of place, and use of language (oh my stars the slang) is everything I love. This is essentially a police procedural set in a fantasy world, exactly my catnip, and all tangled up in a coming-of-age story. Will be reading Bloodhound, hopefully won't take me until next January to get to it.

I'll save ranting about how much I loved Truthwitch for later. I hope. I had meant to write up my thoughts on Almanac two weeks ago, which is not a great sign. I'll get to it! And this is technically the end of Long Awaited Reads Month for me, but... that's not going to stop me from sticking to things that will feel good to read. I need it right now, at least until my lungs stop pretending they belong to my grandfather.

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

I have this little thing, called a blog? And I used to write about books? And then one day I just stopped.

And then one day I just started again. So here we go. Bear with me, I'm incredibly rusty.

Fangirl
by Rainbow Rowell
St. Martin's Griffin, 2013
422 pages

Once upon a long time ago I read a book called Fangirl. It was one of the first books I read this year, in fact. And I loved it. The end.

No no, there's more - and I'm not going to do the book justice, of course, because I read it nearly a year ago, but here's the thing: I read this nearly a year ago, quite quickly, and I still think about it regularly and with a fair amount of clarity. The thing is, it's not just a nice book - and it is, a really nice book, where nice things happen and people are kind and awkward and lovely and maybe sometimes a bit mean but they aren't just awful for no reason. They all have reasons, and they are all sympathetic, even when they are not good reasons. There's no forced love triangle, there's no insta-love, there's no easy answers; there are just good people trying to work their way around being individuals and members of families and friends, which is not always easy and provides enough drama to make an engaging, charming, intelligent book.

More than just being a nice book, Rowell's writing makes the reading of it seem effortless. It's an easy read. It goes down smoothly. It's funny in the right parts, and tense in the right parts, and moving in the right parts. The pacing is absolutely dead on. I was worried that the excerpts from Cath's fanfic would stall things, or be uncomfortable to read (in the way that fiction-within-fiction can sometimes just be... weird) but those excerpts were delightful. I can see why people want to read more Simon Snow.

Me, I'll be reading more Rowell, regardless of whom she's writing about. Thoroughly enjoyed, highly recommended.

three great graphic novels

Daisy Kutter 1: The Last Train
by Kazu Kibuishi
Bolt City Productions, 2012
153 pages

So, I hadn't realized this was re-released. I first started following Kazu Kibuishi online years ago, before Amulet was a thing, by reading his Copper comics. (I've got those in printed form too, now, so that will be reviewed here at some point.) But by the time I realized I was in love with his style and his sensibilities, his first graphic novel, Daisy Kutter, was no longer in print and unavailable anywhere. I was always sad about that because it looked fantastic.

Well, it is. One of my local comic stores supported Kibuishi's Kickstarter to reprint Daisy and I got their last signed copy, which you can imagine made me feel like queen for a day.

It's a steampunk western. Daisy is an ex-con who owns and runs a general store. It's pretty clear she's bored out of her skull by it, but it's a legit living. Her excitement comes from playing poker. So when she loses the store in a high-stakes poker match, she has no choice but to take up the winner's offer to give her the store back - if she participates in one last heist.

There are a few plot holes and the ending wraps up incredibly quickly, but this is the first in (I hope!) a series, and it was extremely enjoyable. Daisy's got depth, as does Tom McKay, the local sherrif who also happens to be Daisy's ex-partner in crime, and ex-partner, period. There are lots of questions to be answered, lots of fleshing out to happen with both characters. The world, while somewhat sketched-in for this first instalment, has a huge amount of promise. Very much looking forward to the next book.



Friends With Boys
by Faith Erin Hicks
First Second, 2012
220 pages

I find it hard to write about this one because all I want to say is LURRRRVE. This is a sweet, funny, quirky, sensitive, wonderfully-drawn coming-of-age graphic novel about a girl who is starting high school after being homeschooled her whole life. She has three older brothers whom she adores, and hasn't really ever felt the need for any friends outside of them. But they've all got their own lives and challenges at school, so she's kind of on her own. Lucky for her, she's not the only one in need of a friend.

What's nice about this is that it's not really deep or difficult, but it's still a portrait of a kid trying to find her place and fit in, while dealing with stuff - some mundane stuff, like dealing her mother's decision to leave the family or her first year at school, and some not at all mundane stuff, like the strange ghost who keeps following her around. Maggie's got challenges but she's competent, and her family (with the notable absence of her mother) is loving and supportive. This makes the book feel safe and a bit gentle, which is sometimes a nice thing in a coming-of-age book about outsiders.

This book is also really funny. The art supports the characters' development in the best way possible. Hicks can express a huge amount about a character just with facial expression and small gestures, and she uses that to full effect. It's an easy-to-follow style, too, meaning this is a great entree into the world of graphic novels. Excellent amounts of geek humour and an affirming message that being "weird" - however one defines it - is okay.



Ms. Marvel Vol. 1: No Normal
by G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona
Marvel, 2014
120 pages

I'm not sure I really need to introduce this book. It's gotten a lot of attention because Ms. Marvel is Kamala, an American-born Muslim teenager of Pakistani decent, who in addition to having to deal with the sudden onset of superpowers and the appearance of a supervillain, has to deal with obnoxious, racist classmates, a fairly traditional family, a diet that forbids bacon, and a curfew. It could have smacked of diversity lip-service, but it was so well-written it didn't.

The book lives up to the hype. There are a lot of things to like here, from the fast-paced plot and the bright, stylized art, to the way it handles what shouldn't be a sensitive issue (Kamala's race and religion) but really is. But what I really appreciated was how realistic the whole thing feels from an emotional perspective, which is not something one can always say when reading superhero comics (or fantasy novels, for that matter.) While the title of the volume is "No Normal" what is refreshing is just how normal Kamala is, right down to the fights she has with her parents when she breaks curfew and is then punished for it. She's got superpowers and she handles their onset in a believable way. She's a teenager and she feels like a teenager.

Also, on a very frivolous note, I dare you to read this one and not fall a little in love with Boris.

Will definitely be following this series.

The Shadow Speaker by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu

The Shadow Speaker
by Nnedi Okorafor
Hyperion, 2007
336 pages

Okay. This review is so unbelievably overdue, given I read this book for Aarti's initiative, A More Diverse Universe. But maybe I can get it into the same year. I had kind of hoped that this book would grow on me when I left it, but unfortunately that didn't happen. I was really excited to read this story, and I think in the end I was disappointed partially because of that.

Ejii is growing up in what used to be West Africa - and still is, but not any West Africa we recognize. After a cataclysm of proportions we start to recognize only as we get further into the book, magic has returned in a big way to Earth. Portals between Earth and other worlds have opened in places, animals speak, and certain humans have magical powers. Ejii is one, a shadow-speaker. She communicates with the shadows, which gives her some powers of telepathy and precognition. She is also the daughter of a man who was a violent, dictator-like, fundamentalist chief of the village, before he was slain by Jaa, the Red Queen. When the shadows tell Ejii that she must follow Jaa to an important meeting between the leaders of Earth and the other worlds, Ejii is torn. She's afraid to go, but curious and determined. So she sets off on the back of her talking camel, Onion, and soon realizes that her journey is going to be stranger, more dangerous, and more important than she could ever have fathomed.

It's not that the whole book was disappointing. So I'm going to start with the disappointing bits in a bid to end on a high note.

This wasn't a good book for me, personally, and I think it basically boils down to the fact that I'm about twenty years too old to really appreciate it. When I'm reading, characters are a key component of my enjoyment; these characters were extremely plot-driven, as opposed to having a plot driven by the character's choices. Characters did things that were utterly in service to the plot and seemed bizarrely out of step with what I thought their characters would do, which meant I was constantly reevaluating my understanding of each character. Not in a good way. It felt very disorienting and I didn't end up very attached to any of the characters. This is usually a death-knell for any book for me.

The thing is, if I was thirteen years old I would have loved this. The characters are BIG - everything is very melodramatic. The teens act like young teens - which would be great, except that most of the adults did too. As an adult I tend to like my characters more nuanced and less shouty and more emotionally consistent, especially if they are supposed to be important and intelligent world leaders.

What saved it for me was that the concept and the world-building are top-notch and really interesting. The setting was gorgeously-described - the descriptions of the colours and the smells and the sights were fantastic and fantastical. I also absolutely loved the language Okorafor uses: there are untranslated words that add so many layers of sound and tone to the writing, and the words that Okorafor makes up for the fantasy elements are magnificent and playful. I liked how the magic worked, I loved that it was never fully explained (because it wasn't ever entirely clear to the characters how they were able to do what they did, or how it was supposed to work - this, however, didn't feel lazy on the author's part, but carefully considered) and I was really interested in how the technology and the magic met and negotiated each other in this world.

But unfortunately, I do prefer my books to be more heavily weighed towards the character than the plot, and this was backwards for me. I think as an angsty pre-teen I would have just eaten this up - I've always been a sucker for interesting world-building, and the cultural background, so different from my own, would have been a huge plus - but as an adult it fell flat for me. I would, however, read more Nnedi Okorafor - I've got both Akata Witch and Zahrah the Windseeker on my list. Those are both books written for a younger audience too, so I'll have a better idea of what I'm getting into this time. I like her ideas and I'm hoping I can find some more consistent characters.

Apologize, Apologize! by Elizabeth Kelly

Apologize, Apologize!
by Elizabeth Kelly
Knopf Canada, 2009
320 pages

This is a book that, like the family it chronicles, is a little dysfunctional. It has a severely split personality and I felt quite strongly that it got away from the author around the 3/4 mark, but she did bring it back, in the end. It's possible I was so thrown by those sections because this is not a usual kind of read for me, but despite the fact that I was a little blindsided it felt a little formulaic, too, which is a very odd juxtaposition. I saw it coming but couldn't quite believe it when it happened.

See, the thing is, a book tends to have a certain tone. And as much as explicit foreshadowing can, the tone can set the stage for what comes; the reader knows that there will be something of a certain magnitude and a certain temperament down the road. Part of an author's job is managing these expectations, I think. What happened to me as I was reading this book was that I did hit the crisis of a certain magnitude, as I expected - it was heavily (but not heavy-handedly) foreshadowed, the tone and early plot very nearly demanded it - but then rather than maintaining the level, several other events of enormous magnitude and very different temperament happened, and they felt out of place, though I understood where Kelly was trying to go with them. We veer crazily from madcap family tragicomedy to a war zone to medical malpractice before we finally come back to our senses, rather than unfolding in a way that feels both logical and emotionally true. I ended up with whiplash.

Which is not to say that this book doesn't have it's excellent moments, and I read it very quickly, almost compulsively, and I liked it, in the end.

So, the summary: Collie (yes, named after the dog) is a first-person narrator, detachedly telling us about his early life and his loudly dysfunctional, incredibly wealthy, strangely endearing (most of them) family. He sees himself as the sane one, the normal one, but he loves all of them, even his emotionally and sometimes physically abusive mother (I didn't see anything likeable about her at all; she had no redeeming qualities whatsoever, which makes her the odd one out in the book) and he spends a lot of his time wanting to crawl into a hole to die of embarrassment, attempting to contain the damage, or trying to coax some sort of order out of the chaos. He's a very sympathetic narrator, and he doesn't spare himself. Dysfunction has made him who he is and he's benefited hugely from the wealth and profile of his family, but he's also very aware (and the reader more so) of just how destructive the dysfunction he grows up around is to everyone touched by it. It's not harmless, even if it is really funny a lot of the time.

One of the blurbs compares this to a Wes Anderson film, and while I try to take those with a grain of salt, I think that one is quite apt. The madcap antics of the eccentric characters that appear harmless on the surface, the underlying melancholy, the peaceful moments, the black humour, the slow unfolding of a tragedy that seems inevitable. That's the first part of the book and it holds up as a comparison. The rest of it not so much.

Collie is the most relatable character in the book, perhaps excluding the verbose, blustering but quietly tender Uncle Tom (acting as the family's live-in maid and servant, pigeon racer, alcoholic.) But getting back to my point that the dysfuction, while amusing, is not harmless: Collie is also incredibly dysfunctional in his own way. Because of the way he has grown up and the personality he has, he is a person whom things happen to; he is at the mercy of everyone around him. He is not forceful - almost religiously not forceful - and he doesn't hold convictions, and he doesn't have any follow-through either. He's a limp fish and while he doesn't ever ask for exoneration, it is not hard to imagine him saying "really, it all had to turn out like this."  And yet somehow I still liked him.

Tonally the book is uneven, but I did enjoy it for what it was, and I'm glad I read it. Mildly recommended to fans of contemporary dysfunctional family narratives (it's a whole genre!); you won't find it a difficult read, and it's got some lovely moments.

Shadows by Robin McKinley

Shadows
by Robin McKinley
Nancy Paulsen Books, 2013
356 pages

Before I go too far with this review, I think it would be helpful to explain a bit about my relationship with Robin McKinley's writing. McKinley was the first fantasy author I read outside of Tolkien, and that book - The Hero and the Crown - made a huge and lasting impression on me. The lead character was female, she was an outcast, she was determined and kind and confused and smart. I devoured that book, and turned back to the beginning and devoured it again, and I have never stopped loving it, though the related book The Blue Sword is the one I love more and has become one of the books I've read the most over the years. I've also read Deerskin (and holy shit was that ever an eye opener when I read it as a young teen - it's not an easy book to read, subject-matter-wise), a number of her short stories, Beauty, The Outlaws of Sherwood, Chalice, and Sunshine - which is also my favourite McKinley book and one of my top three books of all time. I do fully intend to read her entire backlist at some point, with either Spindle's End or Rose Daughter being next on the list.

Suffice to say, I am fairly well-versed in McKinley's works. And while I like some of her books and stories better than I like others, I always respect her work, if that makes sense. She has really excellent characters, and very detailed, realistically flawed worlds, and she rarely wraps all the bits up by the end of the book, but she doesn't write sequels. Sometimes I don't love her endings, but unlike some books, when a McKinley ending doesn't quite work for me it doesn't generally ruin what came before (Chalice might be a slight exception to this rule; I really disliked the ending of that one, enough that I haven't read it since my first reading.) And another thing about McKinley is that each book is different; though there are common threads running through her body of work, the narrative voice is often wildly different between stories.

It's the narrative voice of the titular character that makes Sunshine such a hit for me, and it's that same voice that turns a lot of fans of her other books off that particular one too, I find. It's very unusual, a first person perspective that is almost, but not quite, given stream-of-consciousness rein. I love Sunshine. I love her, and I love the way I can almost become her when I'm reading that book. I love the way some of her expressions, idiosyncratic and odd as they are, bleed into my own personal stream-of-consciousness narrative when I'm reading that book and often for weeks after. I love her turn of phrase, I love the way she thinks. She, more than any other fictional character I have encountered, feels like a friend.

This is key to my feeling about Shadows, because Shadows is pretty much in the same vein. Maggie, the main character in Shadows, is younger and lives in a very different world from Sunshine (maybe?) but that next-to-stream-of-consciousness narration is there in full force. We are right there, inside Maggie's teenage head, as she's telling us the story, and she takes us on her tangents (some of which circle back to be important, and some of which are just flavour) and she flashes back and she uses a lot of slang.

By which I mean to say that I really, really liked this book, and it's probably not for everyone.

Maggie is seventeen years old, and her mother has just remarried after her first husband, the father of her two kids, was killed by a drunk driver seven years previous. Maggie feels she would probably be predisposed to dislike the guy - she's fair-minded that way - but she outright hates him, because he's not normal. He is an immigrant from Oldworld, where magic is still common, which is bad enough. In Newworld, where Maggie and her family live, magic isn't just not practiced, it's illegal. Anyone who shows any sign of being genetically predisposed to magic has their magic gene removed as a kid, and anything that seems odd is reported to the authorities immediately. There are still breaks in reality, completely unpreventable, but the army deals with those using advanced technology. Magic isn't necessary and it's destabilizing and unsafe. But Maggie's new stepfather, Val, has strange shadows that follow him everywhere and seem to move on their own, and Maggie can see them, and they terrify her.

There is a lot going on in Shadows, and part of what I love about it is that it's so easy to read anyway. We have a coming-of-age story. We have a society that might almost be a dystopia, but it's not, not quite, because there are some safeguards against completely authoritarian rule. But it's close, and over the course of the book we see how easy it might be for ordinary people (and even the not-so-ordinary ones) to just accept what they are told as truth, and how easy it might be for those who mean well to step over the line into despotism. What we have, in short, is a world that's unsettlingly familiar, in all its political chicanery and popular intellectual laziness.

We have a love story, but it's fairly secondary. We have a female friendship, between Maggie and her lifelong best friend Jill, that is realistically and beautifully portrayed; they're not catty, they're not mean to each other, they get each other, and sometimes they argue. We have a lot of diversity - Maggie is white, Jill is black, one of the love interests is Eastern European, and another of their good friends is Asian. We have a lot of parallels to our world - certain countries we recognize exist, like Japan, and there are cellphones and drunk drivers and pizza parlours and animal shelters and cliquey, slang-spouting teenagers muddling their way through high school and life. It's also absolutely not a world we live in, with its regularly occurring breaks in reality ("cohesion breaks" or cobeys) and magical gene splicing and "physics of the worlds" departments in local universities and a big army structure designed to clamp down on magic.

We also have a plot that develops surprisingly quickly and smoothly, given the roundabout narration, and that then proceeds with inevitable speed. This book moves once it gets going, and everything slots into its place, and while one's disbelief has to get suspended at one or two points, it mostly works. The end is a bit cheesy. But I've seen far worse.

Oh, and the book is funny.

I don't think this book is for everyone. Some of the slang is a bit overdone (for me, the parts where it worked amazingly well far outweighed the parts where it didn't) and as above, the ending didn't quite fit. But the detail of the world, and the enjoyment I got out of living in Maggie's head, and the fact that all the pieces don't always get explained (there's a bit about Val, the stepfather, that we never learn more about and it's BIG), and the fact that I used the word "cobey" in conversation without realizing in that moment that it wasn't actually a real thing that happens... You should read this, I think. It's not your ordinary young adult novel. It's not your ordinary adult novel. It's something McKinley does well, which is write something entirely, completely new, using bits and pieces of old, and throwing in a strong, vital, honest, and realistic female lead as a bonus.

Starry River of the Sky by Grace Lin

Starry River of the Sky
by Grace Lin
Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2012
288 pages

I have been very remiss in posting this review; I finished the book nearly twenty days ago. They were twenty very busy days, what with March Break being included in there, and family stuff, but twenty days! That's a long time to go between reading a book and writing down one's thoughts.

Happily, I did actually write them down. I just did it the Old Fashioned Way, in my Old Fashioned Moleskine, with my Old Fashioned Ballpoint Pen. And now I shall transcribe them using my Old Fashioned Fingers. Well, transcribe with embellishments, let's say.

I'll start out by suggesting that I don't think this book, written second but set hundreds of years prior to the story of Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, is quite as good as the latter. Which is not to say that this isn't an excellent book; some of the places where I felt Mountain suffered were much better here, and some of the places where I feel that Starry River suffers are better in Mountain. It's a little hard to decide, too, which book it would be better to read first, because I did it in publication order and it works, though I think it would also work the other way. My parent-child book club will be looking at them in reverse order, so I may get their opinions once they've finished the two.

Also, it's weird for me to be writing about a companion book so soon after I read the first, and I suppose comparisons are inevitable because it's that much more fresh in my mind. I have such a large TBR that I don't typically read the same author even twice in one year, let alone twice in three months. So with that and the fact the books are related, I find it a little hard to detangle my feelings about Starry River from Mountain.

That said, they are two different books, noticeably different, even though they share many things, including the structure of the folktales interspersed with the main storyline. Rendi is a stowaway in a merchant's wine cart, and is discovered in the tiny, drought-stricken, impoverished Village of Clear Sky. Dumped out, he is immediately taken on as the chore boy at the village's inn, as the eldest son has disappeared and Master Chao is in need of help. But though the village's sky may be clear, it is moonless, and Rendi is haunted by the sound of groans and weeping every night. A beautiful storyteller, a seemingly senile old man, and the innkeeper's young daughter round out the close characters, and each have a specific part to play in Rendi's own tale.

I think the big difference I noticed was that the story is a lot slower. It is, unlike Mountain, set in one place, and I think this robs the narrative of momentum. On the other hand, I think I developed a deeper emotional connection to Rendi than I did to Minli. This is also because we spend the entire book in Rendi's head, with the exception of the folktales. He is not a comfortable character to spend time with, either, especially at first: Rendi is spoiled, bitter, and angry. He's running away from something, he's incredibly selfish, and he's apparently pretty much determined to make everyone around him as miserable as he is. That said, he's also stubborn and not above taking help where it is offered, both characteristics that stand him in good stead throughout the book. I did find him somewhat endearing, but not immediately. The mystery of his origins was enough to keep me reading at the beginning, and then when I realized who he was (a reader who has read Mountain will figure this out sooner, but perhaps not by much) I had to know how that played out. And soon after I discovered I actually had grown rather fond of the boy.

As with Mountain, some of the fun is thinking about what pieces of the narrative are important and connected to the folktales and vice versa, and there's even more to be had in finding the little connections between the two books, which are there for the noticing and as mentioned above may lead to the reader figuring out clues a little sooner. As for the folktale-narrative connections, I did find them a little bit less subtle, a little more predictable, and therefore I felt a little less amazed and excited by them as I did in Mountain. I do wonder how much of this was just familiarity with the structure and style, and might not have noticed this as much if I had been reading Starry River first.

I should make brief mention of the ending: I loved it. I was kind of amazed at Lin's guts, but I loved it. I am really curious to see how the kids in my book club handle it. It's hard to say anything without spoilers, but I think I can safely say that it ended in a very open way, and there is lots of room for speculation as to what comes next. I am very comfortable with this kind of ending, but I suspect others might find it abrupt. It did make me want to read Mountain to see if I can get any clues as to where Rendi ends up immediately post-narrative.

As before, too, this book is beautifully put together and the art is lovely, and fitting. I wanted more of the artwork, but I'll take what I can get. The imagery and description in this book is beautiful, and there was a particular part that I can't talk about without spoilers that was that perfect combination of imagery and narrative "click" that makes me a very happy reader. I'd read the whole book over again just for that part. (And almost certainly will.)

Recommended. Starry River of the Sky is stand-alone, as is Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, but I do think reading them [relatively close] together has been a good experience. If you're only going to try one, I'd say go with Mountain, but neither are difficult or long reads, so you might as well meet and spend some time with prickly Rendi too.

After the Golden Age by Carrie Vaughn

After the Golden Age
by Carrie Vaughn
Tor Fantasy, 2012
342 pages

Sometimes a girl just needs to shelf graze. I have an enormous TBR list; it's well over 1000 items now. I have series I'm half-finished and books I have to read for book club. But every once in a while I indulge in the luxury of browsing library shelves and seeing what sticks out, picking it up based on whatever information can be gleaned from the cover and the synopsis. One can find the most wonderful things that way.

Superheroes. Superhero comics. I have always more loved the idea of them than I've actually loved the comics themselves; though a big graphic novel fan, I've always found traditional superhero comics to be hard to follow, art-wise, and they are often darker, grimmer, grittier than I generally enjoy. But traditional superhero stories and tropes? I love them. So what is essentially a superhero comic in prose, sans visual art, is like candy. If it's a little light on the grit, so much the better. Add in one of my favourite concepts - exploring the superheroes from the perspective of the mundane folks around them - and I had trouble not thinking about this book all the time. I was stuck right in it. I revelled in being stuck. And, lest I over-think this in the following paragraphs, let me please make the point that not only was this book interesting in concept, it was so, so much fun.

The book follows the story of Celia West, only child to the greatest superheroes Commerce City has ever known. Celia has no superpowers herself, a grave disappointment to her parents, her father especially. Growing up she has struggled to find her place, to distinguish herself in her own right, to find her way out from behind her parents' shadows. Now a forensic accountant with a prestigious firm, she is assisting the DA put her parents' greatest enemy, the Destructor, behind bars by following his financial trail - much to her father's chagrin.

Okay, yes, the superheroes' daughter is a forensic accountant, which was probably my first big trigger to pick this up. I love mysteries, and I loved that Celia's job was so unglamourous compared to her superhero background (so does she.) Celia has had a rough go of it; in addition to being a major disappointment to her parents, she's a favourite target of the criminal elements of Commerce City, because of her known connection to the Olympiad, the organization of four superheroes who look after the city.

And now we have come to the point where the superheroes are middle-aged. Their nemesis is behind bars, their secret identities are blown. They still do their work, and they do it well, but they are past their prime. And some people know that, and they're about to take advantage of it. And Celia is going to get caught right in the middle, despite the fact that she has made it her life's work to stay as far out of her parents' way as she possibly can.

So, there are some problems with this book, and I'll get them out of the way first. I should say, too, that any problems I noted are generally the same sorts of problems that superhero comics enjoy: plot holes (how can the DA possibly ignore the major conflict of interest he introduces when he asks for Celia to work on the prosecution team?) and larger-than-life characters that seem a little static, a little rote (um, you know: superheroes.) I am pretty sure this isn't a coincidence. This book is nothing if not a loving homage to the superhero comic. It's not beyond investigating the tropes and poking a bit of fun, but overall it's going with the flow, and so what would probably lose me in a different kind of book only made me shake my head here.

I have been trying to figure out what, beyond the concept, kept me so very, very engaged, and I think it must have been Celia herself. The characters around her - even the potential love interests (less so for one than the other, certainly), and the friends - are comic book characters, perfectly groomed and inscrutable, fully committed to their missions and not terribly emotionally deep. Even Celia's father, Warren West aka Captain Olympus is very much a comic book character, and in Warren's case I think the intention was to get a little bit deeper.

The writing is pretty standard, by which I mean it fades into the background, which is much harder than it appears. Occasionally repetition was a bit of an issue; observations of certain facts or character traits were made more than strictly necessary, which occasionally felt like being foreblugeoned. Flashbacks are present, so if you're not a fan, watch out. They actually had less of an impact on the pacing than I usually find flashbacks do, though I'm not sure they did exactly what they were supposed to do, which was (I think) deepen my understanding of and sympathy for Celia. I liked her just fine without the flashbacks, and still didn't exactly buy her stupid mistake, even when it was shown and not just told. Which, maybe, was part of the point? That it was as inexplicable and uncomfortable to her, looking back, as it was to everyone else around her?

This is a gentle, fond examination of superhero tropes and ideas. The superhuman past his prime. Superhero as concerned parent unable to handle a rebellious teenager. Vigilante justice. Superhero-police relations. Hero worship. Celebrity media culture. What Vaughn does, to good effect, is to take the superhero story at face value: the city is called Commerce City, the superheroes have names like The Bullet and Captain Olympus and Typhoon, all without apparent cynicism or irony. They have a secret command post, various outlandish vehicles. Looked at through the eyes of a mundane observer, even one entirely used to the spectacle, this all takes on a faintly ridiculous cast, but it's taken seriously. Vaughn takes some of this to its logical conclusion, too: what would it really be like to have telepathic powers? What would happen if a superhero was caught out after curfew and shot at? How would it feel to grow up knowing you could never, ever, even in your wildest dreams, follow in your father's footsteps? How would a superhero act at the dinner table over delivered pizza? (The answer: not well.) What I mean is, I wouldn't call this a parody or a satire, nor a tribute, exactly. It's something in between. It's a fine line to walk, I think, and it's so well done.

Highly, highly readable, enormously entertaining, funny, sweet, occasionally moving, and sometimes thought-provoking. Recommended if you're a fan of fantasy or a fan of comics. There is a follow-up, Dreams of the Golden Age, which has just been released, and which I already have on hold. I loved living in this world and I'm really looking forward to going back.

Cold Magic by Kate Elliott

Cold Magic (Spiritwalker 1)
by Kate Elliott
Orbit, 2010
544 pages

This is a book that gets at the heart of one of the more difficult questions I face when I am thinking and talking and recommending books and writing: what carries a novel? Is it the writing? The plot? The concepts? The characters? Is it all four? Can a book succeed on the strength of one? Can it fall on the weakness of one?

I picked this book as a book club read for my adventurous genre readers, it being a very interesting example (I thought) of that particular niche of fantasy, gaslamp/steampunk. It turns out that it's not quite either, but that's neither here nor there; what it is, concept-wise, is incredibly rich. It's a fantasy set at the time of the Industrial Revolution, or what we would call the Industrial Revolution, in a world where magic is part of the fabric of society, Christianity is just a very minor sect in a large pantheon of religions, and Africa is a wasteland populated by ghouls. Amerike (sic) is populated by a birdlike, friendly, highly intelligent humanoid race called trolls, European society is heavily Roman-influenced one thousand years after the fall of the Empire, and the African diaspora has settled and become part of the fabric of society and culture such that the colour of one's skin is no indicator of heritage and someone of predominantly Celtic culture is as likely to be black as someone of predominantly Mande culture is likely to be white and children of the same parents can have varying colours of skin and hair. In other words, racism, as we know it, isn't an issue here. Magical ability, class, and wealth, on the other hand, are the main drivers of discrimination.

Sounds good so far, doesn't it? The world is incredibly complex. The cultures are carefully thought-out and inspired by a multitude of historical cultures and mythologies. The main characters aren't white, which counts for a fair bit in the world of fantasy fiction. The characters: Cat, or Catherine, and her cousin Bee, or Beatrice are two young women nearing the age of majority, educated and of a venerable, but down-on-its-luck family. They are full of new and dangerous ideas about science and technology, while still navigating their worlds with magic. Cat is an orphan, raised as Bee's sister by her aunt and uncle, and the two girls are absolutely devoted to each other. Even the concept of these characters is awesome.

Here we start to stumble a bit, but let me move on to the plot.

Which gets very bogged down very quickly with that dangerous problem of exposition. When one has a world as cool and complex and alien, but not quite alien enough, as the world of Cold Magic is, one has to explain it. And a good writer can make that happen, almost like magic, but that is not at all what happened here. There are a couple of ways to take on the problem of exposition: infodumping ("as you know, Bob, the general tried to conquer the known world but has been in prison these last thirteen years...") and thrusting the reader right into things and trusting they'll land on their feet (usually my preferred option). Elliott employs a clumsy, poorly-edited combination of the two and this is, depending on your threshold for that fourth component, the writing, disastrous.

I will be honest: I did not think I was going to make it to the end of this book. By the time I hit the ninth chapter I was furious. I had picked this book on the understanding that it was critically well-received (Publisher's Weekly, I am looking at you) and I was appalled at the writing. There were things on every single page that tore me right out of my struggling attempts to enter the world, ranging from awkward sentences to clear copy editing errors to blocks of confusing and seemingly aimless exposition. The prose veered from pedestrian to purple, occasionally laughably so. The text meandered, the dialogue was stilted, the characters unfocused. I was being treated to infodumps and I still had no idea what was going on, and what was worse, I really didn't care.

I was angry because I could see, I could feel, that there was something here. There was a kernel, maybe just the concept of the world or the idea of characters and conflict, of something that could be really interesting. And I felt that Elliott wasn't getting the editing she desperately needed. An editor should have tightened up those first nine chapters, or chopped them completely. Condensed them to one. It felt like the author was wandering vaguely in a forest of awesome worldbuilding and character description exercises and couldn't get her bearings.

But.

Once she gets her bearings, watch out.

I don't think that the writing got appreciably better, and I lost count of the number of times we were treated to the fact that the lying Romans had called the Kena'ani "Phoenicians" and the great city of Qart Hadast "Carthage." A writer with more grace would have let the reader remember those facts on her own. But what did start happening was plot. It was like Elliott suddenly knew exactly what she wanted to do with this interesting world she had built, and the characters marshalled around that, and suddenly I was nearly halfway through the 544 page book and I wanted to know what was going to happen next, because somehow, suddenly, I cared.

As E. M. Forster said, "and then what?" has a lot of power. Add some half-decent characters and some very imaginative trappings, and you have yourself a very readable book.

The problem with a read like this is that I don't quite know what to do with it. I enjoyed myself, in the end. I almost couldn't put the thing down and I definitely didn't want to. I even quite liked Cat, and loved that she was so fiercely protective of herself and her own power; if you're looking for a book with a very strong female character with a lot of agency and determination, you could do a lot worse than this one. It didn't leave me with a glowing impression, but I also wasn't left with that empty, potato-chip-gorged feeling I get when reading something I don't really like just because I have to get to the end. I liked this book and I can still respect myself in the morning.

This book succeeded on the strength of the concepts and eventually the plot, and fell down on the weakness of the writing. Depending on your threshold for each, this is a read you might enjoy, or might hate, and I think you'd be right in either case.

Level Up by Gene Luen Yang and Thien Pham

Level Up
by Gene Luen Yang, illustrated by Thien Pham
First Second, 2011
160 pages

I was so charmed by this graphic novel, though it occurs to me that "charming" is maybe not a word that fits, exactly. "Satisfied" is maybe closer, but doesn't quite fit, either, because it doesn't convey the warmth of the way I feel about this story. Perhaps we should just stick with "I'm very glad I read it."

My experience of this book was interesting, too. Usually I blow through graphic novels; really, there are few that have taken me more than a day to read, and those are usually long (the Cardcaptor Sakura omnibus editions, for example.) This one, due to various things (including, ahem, video games) I took several days to get through. But I think this was maybe a good thing. It allowed me to think about what I was reading, rather than just inhaling it.

Dennis loves video games. Perhaps a bit too much. He's just been kicked out of college (the gaming's not the only reason) and he's got no idea how to tell his widowed mother; he knows his father, who passed away just after Dennis finished high school, would be extremely disappointed. In fact, he keeps thinking he's seeing his father's disapproving face on every statue he passes... and then the angels show up. It turns out they've arrived, straight out of a greeting card and with his father's blessing, to help Dennis achieve his destiny: go to med school, and become a gastroenterologist.

It's a little hard to describe, but when you're actually reading the book, it's pretty straightforward. It's also not all that much about video games or about the angels. It's about Dennis wrestling with his internal demons, coming to terms with his father's death, trying to figure out what he wants to do, and what duty to family, friends, and self has to do with any of it. He's an incredibly smart kid, he knows how to work hard, and he loves video games. What's more, he's actually pretty good at them. (His gamer friend, Takeem, suggests that Dennis' brain was made by Nintendo.) But his father always viewed them as a total waste of time and money, and Dennis still feels the weight of his disapproval, and his hopes and expectations for Dennis, too.

If I had any complaints, it's that things do seem to come across as a bit too easy. Dennis is a stellar gamer, able to win tournaments regularly. When he's at school, he's got four angels hanging out and doing his laundry, his dishes, feeding him, and so on, so all he has to do is concentrate on his studies. That said, it is a graphic novel and he's got four angels doing his housework... so, no expectations of gritty realism here? And he does work hard, at whatever he chooses to do. There is also a bit of an either/or dichotomy happening with gaming/living a real life, but let's just say that someone like me probably has no place criticizing that. I know some people seem to be able to cultivate a healthy balance, but lord knows I'm not one of them. Perhaps that's why I liked this book as much as I did.

Overall, the tale is told with simple but lovely artwork, gentle (often very funny) humour, nostalgia for the great games (Bubble Bobble makes a brief appearance; Pac Man figures heavily) and huge sympathy and respect for Dennis' character and his challenges. Well worth a read, particularly for those interested in contemporary coming-of-age stories for teens and young adults.

The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron

The Higher Power of Lucky (The Hard Pan Trilogy 1)
by Susan Patron
Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2006
134 pages

I am turning over a new leaf a couple of weeks early, and never again assigning books for my parent-child book clubs that I have not yet read myself. I have good reasons for this. I had never read this book, but I've wanted to for years, and aside from the fact that it won the Newbery and I was pretty sure it would be fantastic, and that Darla recommends it, I knew very little about it.

Loved this book. Let's get that out of the way first.

Am not sure the kids in the group will love this book, but I think the parents will enjoy it, and I certainly hope they won't throw a fit over the word "scrotum" appearing. We shall see. It's a quieter story than the kids in this particular group tend to like, but it's also very short, so I think there is potential here. Also, it's hard not to love Lucky.

Lucky lives in the tiny town of Hard Pan in California, a little place in the middle of the desert that used to be a mining town but has dwindled down to a population of 43. Two of those people are Lucky and her guardian, Brigitte, a beautiful woman from France who has come to take care of Lucky at the behest of her entirely absent father, since Lucky's mother died two years before. And Lucky is certain that Brigitte is planning to head back to France any time now, leaving her entirely orphaned, so she will have to leave Hard Pan, and her friends Lincoln and Miles, her dog HMS Beagle, and everything she knows. So now Lucky really needs to find her Higher Power, like the people at the twelve step meetings she keeps eavesdropping on, because Lucky is planning to run away.

She is such a prickly child, Lucky. And she's an odd duck, there's no question. She has a very particular way of looking at the world, and it's highly amusing to an outsider, but to her it's a very serious way. She is working her way as logically as she can through some very difficult things - her mother's death is raw, and her fear of being abandoned is constant - and while an adult reader can look at Lucky and wonder exactly how she comes to the conclusions she does, they make perfect sense to the child Lucky is. She is also good-hearted, curious, and passionate. Her greatest hero is Charles Darwin. She likes snakes. How could I not love this kid?

Also, she is the kind of kid who describes things like this:

Lucky had the same jolting feeling as when you're in a big hurry to pee and you pull down your pants fast and back up to the toilet without looking - but some man or boy before you has forgotten to put the seat down. So your bottom, which is expecting the usual nicely shaped plastic toilet seat, instead lands shocked on the thin rim of the toilet bowl, which is quite a lot colder and lower. Your bottom gets a panic of bad surprise.

"A panic of bad surprise." Isn't that great?

The other characters, particularly Brigitte, Lincoln, Miles, and Short Sammy, are seen through the very close lens of Lucky's perception, though the book is told in third-person. They are therefore somewhat limited in their characterization, but Patron does a good job of fleshing them out as well as she can for us. We see through Lucky's eyes, but we notice things that she does not, in her descriptions of events and reports of conversations. And Lucky is a pretty observant kid, about many things.

It would be remiss of me to forget to mention the charming illustrations by Matt Phelan sprinkled throughout the tale. They're pencil, black and white, and they perfectly suit the mood and tale, and bring Lucky and Hard Pan to life in a slightly whimsical way.

So, yes. This book: recommended. It's maybe not a must-read for an adult, but I don't think you would go wrong by reading it, and the story and characters have stuck with me well after the book was gone. I'm looking forward to seeing how the kids react to it. Kids who are looking for contemporary stories will eat this up. It's amusing, silly, serious, charming, and just the right length.

Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo

Because of Winn-Dixie
by Kate DiCamillo, read by Cherry Jones
Random House Audio, 2001 (text published in 2000)
2 discs, unabridged

This is not my first time around for this book, and I'm very happy to report that I'm sure it won't be my last, either. It improves on re-reading. Of all of the books I have read with my parent-child book club over the last three years, this has remained a steady favourite. I can think of only one or two other books that my veteran members mention as much, with as much fondness, as they mention Winn-Dixie. So when we started a second parent-child book club, this was a no-brainer choice. And when my first book club participants have all grown out of it and I'm on to a new crop of families, I'll read it with that group again.

I often don't re-read the books that I've already read for book club again, but I loved this when I read it the first time. The audiobook seemed like a good choice, and it had been a couple of years; a refresher was in order.

I'll refer you to my original entry on this book for the summary. Instead, here I'll talk a bit about the audiobook, and some of the things that occurred to me this go-round.

The audio is well done. Cherry Jones does a solid narration job, and brings India Opal Buloni and Naomi, Florida, to life. Her accent is broadly Southern and puts this Canadian more in mind of Georgia than Florida, which might have surprised me more if one of the parents in the group hadn't mentioned it to me before I got my hands on a copy. But it fits, and the cadence of Opal's voice as written really comes to life when read. It adds an extra flavour to the text, which is already rich with the feel of a small town in Florida in summer. And on audio this book is a breeze, at under two hours. It goes by almost too quickly.

I really noticed two things this time through, and they're completely unconnected. Mechanics first: this story is spare. The fact that I recognized it this time might have been exactly because the audiobook feels so short. Kate diCamillo is an expert at understatement, and there is not a single detail in this book that does not need to be there. She knows where to focus her (and therefore our) attention, and how to make time pass without narrating its passing. And she is concise. Opal and the preacher (her father) have a deeply loving relationship, and a complex one, and it is drawn in its complexity and depth with a few spare strokes. Characters, too, are drawn so carefully yet so naturally that one knows them within a few lines and yet they're not one-dimensional, unless Opal sees them as one-dimensional. And when she grows out of that view, it doesn't take more than a few words for the reader to grow their understanding of the character as well. She's a master of concision and it is a beautiful thing to read (or hear.)

The other is that though Winn-Dixie the dog may be a catalyst, he's not the star of the story as much as Opal thinks he is. She doesn't recognize it herself, but it's her integrity, bravery, and kindness that lead to the changes that happen to her over the summer. She may be braver because Winn-Dixie is beside her, but the decisions she makes are her own, and her choices to seek friendship where others might not, and to foster ties where others might not, to open lines of communications that have been silent previously, are the choices that make the difference, not Winn-Dixie's sunny, intelligent, gentle personality. And not that kids' stories have to have "good messages," but this one, in addition to being a lovely, entertaining, funny, sweetly melancholy story, does. It's a message about being kind and looking beyond the surface. That's not a bad thing to take away from a book, for a child or an adult. It's nice that one doesn't feel Messaged At to get to that point, too.

It's hard for me to say whether or not, if you are only going to do one or the other, you should read this or listen to the audiobook. Either is a good choice. But definitely do one or the other. Don't pass this book by.

Heriot by Margaret Mahy

Heriot
by Margaret Mahy
Faber and Faber, 2009
353 pages

There is something about Margaret Mahy's writing. The way this woman used words is special, and I always find myself feeling a little breathless and awed when I am reading her books - even her children's books, our favourite of which is Bubble Trouble. I don't think her writing is for everyone; I do think, occasionally, that the way the words are put together takes precedence over the story and the characters, and a perfectly marvelous little jewel of the English language will shine a little too brightly for the rest of the paragraph to support it. But I am in love with my language, and am okay to admire something that is just so beautiful, or apt, or beautifully strange that it pulls one away from the story it is telling for just the briefest moment.

Beautifully strange pretty much describes this book, as well. The titular character, Heriot Tarbas, is only one of three point-of-view characters in the novel, though he gets the majority of the book. We meet him as a boy, living on a farm built in the ruins of a much grander structure (love this) and surrounded by his industrious and loving, but somewhat puzzled, family. Heriot has always been a little strange, plagued by visions, vivid dreams, and terrible headaches and "fits." So he is marked as being different. But he loves his life on the farm, and when events conspire to pull him away from it, he is desperate to escape his destiny.

Heriot is inextricably tied, by magic and then by friendship, to Dysart, the third son of the King of Hoad, our third point-of-view character and considered "mad" because he too is plagued by strange visions and dreams, as well as extraneous because he has two elder brothers to be heirs to the throne. The second point-of-view character is Linnet, daughter of one of the Lords of Hoad, whose fortunes become tied to Dysart's and by extension to Heriot's when she and Dysart are thrown together in classes while Dysart's father is negotiating a peace with their warring neighbours.

It struck me as interesting that I've now read two novels in the past two months that are about how difficult maintaining a peace can be - more difficult, in some ways, than constant warring. In both it is the generation that grows up in peacetime, that is used to peace and understands their function in it, that can be the instruments of preserving the peace when it becomes strained. But this is only one of the themes in Heriot worth mentioning. The book also explores the dangers of seeing people as symbols, themes of love and friendship, the process of self-discovery and self-actualization. It looks carefully at the stories we tell ourselves and the stories others tell about us, and what those stories can mean to the teller and the told, and what powers one has and doesn't have over the stories told about oneself.

It is not a perfect book, despite my love for it. Frankly I thought Linnet was entirely underused, her storyline somewhat predictable and undeveloped, and that was disappointing. And all of the characters can be a bit slippery, hard to define, despite being distinct and interesting. There can be a distance between the reader and the characters, even the point-of-view characters. I was fascinated by Heriot and grew to love him; I loved Cayley, the fourth major character, from the start, but he's not an easy character to pin down, either. This is not completely unexpected with Mahy, though, I don't think. I feel the same distance from Sorry and his family in her book The Changeover and I think it is a bit of a function of the strangeness of the characters' abilities and situations. Because that's the thing: there is strangeness, and discomfort. The characters experience it and the reader does, too, and not just because the characters are experiencing it. There is something about Mahy's writing that can be uncompromisingly odd. I wish I could tell you how she does it.

The other thing that amazes me is that she can walk that line between being beautifully (sometimes viscerally, brutally) descriptive and can take a person out of the story with her language, and yet I have never considered her to be flowery or purple in her prose. It all seems to fit, or perhaps I am giving her a pass because passages like "What he could make out was the unfamiliar accent, much quicker and more clipped than the family voices, and more careful. Lord Glass polished every word a little bit before he let it out on its own in the world." delight me so much.

And if you are the sort of person who needs to have all the blanks filled in, this is not a book that will agree with you much; there are periods of time that go unexplored and many things that go unsaid. The reader has to do a bit of work, and it's not always easy work either. I have noticed, too, that some people find the ending too explain-y, but I didn't mind that particular bit at all. The clues were all there, and I found it cathartic to have someone finally lay it out, make the final important connections.

I can't say for sure whether this is the best introduction to Mahy if you've never read anything by her; to be honest, I've read a lot of her children's books (all of them? I hope not) and only two of her books for older readers. Between the two, I do think The Changeover is more accessible, because Laura's an easier character to grasp and to inhabit. But Heriot has a scope and a sweep that The Changeover does not, and lovers of high fantasy who are willing to give something a bit different a try, or who love it when an author revels in her facility with words and is able to share some of that joy with her readers, would do well to read this one.

The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall

The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy
by Jeanne Birdsall
Oakhill Audiobooks, 2008 (originally published in 2005)
6 discs, unabridged

This book feels like an older children's classic -- along the lines of The Railway Children, say -- and yet is relatively recent. It felt like I was listening to a story from my childhood again; only this was brand new, with new characters and new adventures. And I'd say Jeanne Birdsall has taken pains to make sure this book will remain as timeless as possible; there are telephones and cars, but no mention of what sorts of telephones and cars. Technology doesn't really make an appearance, aside from a mention of a computer that one of the girls uses once, and though that itself could make the book feel dated, it doesn't. This is a summer tale, an outdoor tale, a tale of four girls and a cottage and a lovely extended vacation. With, as the book's subtitle mentions, two rabbits and a very interesting boy. And a dog. And another very interesting boy.

Maybe I am just a sucker for this sort of thing, but if that's so, I'm in good company: The Penderwicks won a National Book Award the year it was released. It has played very well with the adults who give out awards and starred reviews. It first came to my attention through the discerning Aarti. I am curious to know if it will play as well with kids. My child-parent book club is going to be reading it next spring, to get them set for summer, and I'm very curious to know if they will enjoy it as much as I have.

The Penderwicks, four girls, their loving but somewhat distracted father, and their dog Hound, are on summer vacation. Seeking a last minute cottage rental, they've chanced upon a place called Arundel -- a grand estate in the mountains, a mansion with beautifully manicured gardens. Their cottage is a humble, but lovely, little place behind the mansion, hidden from the main grounds by a tall hedge. And while that would be fun enough for four girls with big imaginations and lively curiosity, there happens to be a handsome young gardener (handsome enough and young enough to turn eldest Penderwick Rosalind's 12-year-old head for a first crush), a friendly and comforting housekeeper, a nasty, shrill, very rich lady who owns the place, her sneering suitor, and her mysterious son, who happens to be just the right age to make an ideal playmate for the girls.

And the girls play. They get into all sorts of scrapes and wild adventures over their three week vacation, some of them inadvertent and some of them deliberate, some of them dangerous and some of them harmless. They are good-hearted, imperfect, and impulsive, which makes for excellent stories. You're always rooting for whichever Penderwick is featured, even when you know she's squarely responsible for her own tricky situation. What makes this book are the characters, not necessarily the storylines; and not necessarily the secondary characters, either. Mr. Penderwick is charming, but hardly there (not in a bad way, mind you, and when he needs to be he is there) and Churchie the housekeeper, Harry the Tomato Man, and even Cagney the gardener are all pretty one-note, though very alive and each quite likable. Mrs. Tifton and her suitor are pretty much caricatures and extremely dislikable. It's the four girls -- motherly, responsible Rosalind, difficult and brilliant Skye, dreamy Jane, and shy little Batty -- and Jeffrey Tifton who make the story worth reading. They are gently handled by Birdsall, even Skye, who I'll admit was a challenging character for me at first though she did grow on me. Their dreams and fears and feelings are all considered fairly and without judgement, and they felt like very, very authentic people. I'm not so far away from Jane or Rosalind (though Skye is pretty foreign to me) that I don't remember what that was like. Birdsall has it pretty much dead on.

Which lead to a couple of very uncomfortably squirmy moments for me, listening in the car. At one point I actually stopped the audiobook cold without even realizing I'd planned to do it, just before Skye did something she should not have done, but that I couldn't blame her for, that I kind of wanted her to do, but that I was painfully aware was going to be mortifying for her and therefore by extension for me. Except when I realized what I'd done and turned the audio back on, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared. Birdsall once again treated Skye with dignity and didn't play up the full mortifying horror of the situation for amusement or tension as a different author might have done.

The reader of the audiobook, Laurence Bouvard, is a voice actor and veteran audiobook reader, and that comes through. Overall the narration was good. I occasionally had some trouble -- Jeffrey and Cagney sounded pretty much the same to me, and Mr. Penderwick just sounded silly and dopier than I think he was, text-wise. However, her voices for the four girls were brilliant and I never had any trouble telling any of them apart. I do find children's audiobooks can be really hit or miss for me; I don't like being talked down to and can't stand it for an entire story. I wouldn't say this was an entire hit, as it occasionally skirted that very subjective line, but it certainly wasn't a miss.

A warm, engaging, fun, gently-told story that appeals to me for any number of reasons. I think this would be a perfect family read-aloud, especially for the summer... or maybe for the cold spring, when summer seems too far away and a little warmth is needed.

The Secret Life of Prince Charming by Deb Caletti

The Secret Life of Prince Charming
by Deb Caletti
Simon Pulse, 2009
336 pages

Having been working on this book for ages (it was my "at work book" -- read during fifteen minute breaks, mostly, with the occasional half-hour lunch thrown in), once I finally finished it I put down in writing that I'd like to read pretty much everything else Deb Caletti has written. This is not my usual response to YA books, which generally get me all excited to read them and then end up disappointing me something fierce. It is even less my usual response to contemporary lit, and even less my usual response to reading a book targeted so squarely at females only (my fondness for romance novels notwithstanding). I mention that this was my at-work-book only because those books have to hit a particular, rather challenging niche: they have to be light enough that reading them in fifteen minute chunks is not a detriment to understanding the story and getting things out of the book, but engaging enough that I a) remember what happened last time, and b) want to use my precious break time to read it.

Quinn Hunt's parents are divorced, and she and her little sister Scout live with their mother, their mother's sister, and their mother's mother. After a significant period of time not seeing him at all, Quinn pushed her mother to allow her to reconnect with her father, a performer/manager/owner of a Vaudevillian stage act. The divorce was messy and the relationship between their parents continues to be acrimonious, but Quinn is desperate for a relationship with him, wants to know him and be known to him, so her mother allows it. Five years later, seventeen-year-old Quinn is generally happy with the way things are going -- she thinks. But then, during one visit, something happens. Something that changes everything, even though she desperately wants to ignore it. And suddenly Quinn finds herself on a mission with Scout and her estranged half-sister Frances Lee to meet the women of her father's past, and hopefully discover the truth of who her father is.

So we have here a tale generally about love and integrity. I've seen some people around the webs complain that it's "anti-male" and a bit heavy-handedly negative, and I find I can't quite agree. It's not even that obviously didactic in most places -- though it is didactic, and occasionally does slip a bit into blunt-force. But overall the story is so well done, and the characters so vivid, that the message(s) that Caletti wishes to convey are pretty well incorporated. That is, this is an Issues book that doesn't feel so much like an Issues book that I couldn't read it for the story and the characters. It's also the sort of Issues book I'd like every young woman in my life to read.

The topic of "love" doesn't just extend here to romantic love, though that is something of a focus, particularly of the didactic bits. But it's also a lot about familial love -- love between sisters, between parent and child, between absent parent and child. It has a lot to say about what constitutes a family. It has a fair bit to say about divorce (neither pro- nor con-, though it's clear that Caletti would like to encourage young women to avoid divorce by the dint of not letting a relationship that isn't working or isn't healthy get so far as marriage in the first place). As someone who has been extremely fortunate to grow up with an intact, generally very functional nuclear family, I learned -- grew to understand -- a lot about the challenges of kids of divorced parents. Granted, in this case, one of the parents is a tremendous asshole, and that's not always the case, but there are things I think must be common to kids who have two parents who split amicably, too. In particular the way Quinn describes the way children of divorce are expected to cope with their parents' new relationships and all that comes with them really struck me.

As to "anti-male," it's not terribly. There are a couple of examples of good, healthy, lovely relationships in the book, too -- each different from the other, but present. But anti-asshole this book definitely is. It's also very clear that while some guys are assholes, women need to take responsibility for their relationships, too. Not in a shaming sort of way, but in a way that recognizes that everyone makes mistakes -- it's about correcting that mistake, and not letting it define you or ruin your life out of some misplaced sense of obligation, fear, or shame. The book is pretty clear on the kind of damage a bad relationship can do, the consequences it can have, even when it's not technically "abusive" in the obvious meaning of the word. I wondered, as I read, where the line between just being a bad father or husband and being emotionally or psychologically abusive is. There is no answer to this in this book, but the damage done is clear and present.

Quinn is a great character; a bit of an every-girl, with a professed love of math (not explored nearly enough for my taste, barely makes a dent in the book proper) and a deep desire to do things right. She's also one of those people (I know this, because I am one) who desperately needs approval, even when its source isn't necessarily the right one. She wants people to like her, she wants to be a good daughter, she is absolutely a good sister. But she's also brave, in an accidental kind of way, and I like that it is accidental, and then she just goes along not necessarily for bravery's sake but because she's committed and doesn't want to back down. She is relatable, but not completely without her own personality; she has a strong voice, at times humourous, at times raw, always easy to read.

Not a perfect book, and not for everyone, but highly enjoyable if you enjoy contemporary women's fiction and don't mind a young adult narrator. Low-key romance, and occasionally a bit didactic, but never dull. Often funny, often touching, often thought-provoking. And both heavier, and lighter, than I've made it seem here. Looking forward to more Caletti in the future.

The Zabime Sisters by Aristophane

The Zabime Sisters
by Aristophane
First Second, 2010
96 pages

One of the reasons I write this blog is to examine my own reactions to what I read. So, in the interests of examination, I'm going to write some stuff down about The Zabime Sisters, even though it's hard to come by anything that's not "well, it was there, and I read it." I'm sure everyone has experiences like this while reading; something doesn't catch, despite the feeling that it should have and clearly has for others, and one is not quite sure why.

This is one of those graphic novels that I really feel like I should like. I wanted badly to like it and I feel a little inadequate that I don't. It's serious art, it's different, it is a slice-of-life piece. It's a piece of work that is critically acclaimed and has lots to recommend it. And it's not that I thought I didn't "get" it... I got it. I am pretty sure. I just didn't fall in love with it, I didn't have raptures over it. I understand it, I ... just ... am not even ambivalent. I have no visceral reaction. I wasn't even bored by it. It just landed on my consciousness, stuck there for a bit, and then quietly moved on.

The Zabime Sisters follows three girls on the cusp of growing up through the course of one summer day. The inkwork is very heavy, the perspectives changeable and interesting, though the artwork didn't really do much for me. I am extremely aware of my own limitations here; I don't know enough about graphic novels, comics, art history, etc. to have any critical opinion on the panels in a graphic novel. I know what I tend to prefer, but I think I also have a fairly wide range of taste. There was something about the artwork that I found a bit alienating, and maybe that was part of the issue. It was deliberately distancing and disorienting, I think, in some places so full of movement as to be almost alarming.

(Okay, this is working! I am actually recognizing what went "wrong" for me with this book! And in thinking closely about the artwork, I'm developing the sort of reaction to it that I didn't have while actually reading the thing. Despite it's alienating feel, I actually rather like it better, in hindsight.)

The story itself is unsentimental to the extreme, in that again, there is a distance, and it picks up and leaves off very abruptly -- perhaps the best example of slice-of-life storytelling I've ever encountered. Except that there was a lot of writing that felt like it was trying to create some sort of connection with the reader, but failing miserably. The text reports a lot on the inner workings of the characters, but in a way that doesn't really feel authentic but seems like it is trying to be authentic. It felt awkward, unmoored in anything, and the turn of phrase was often strange enough to draw attention to itself. Which makes me wonder if it was a problem of translation, versus the original French text. Or maybe it was trying to do something that didn't work for me.

Which is what it comes down to, I think. I think for the right people, this is probably a wonderful reading experience. It's just not right for me, and instead of being something I disliked, it just fell flat. Disappointing, in that I wanted very much to like this book. Have any of you read it? What did you think? What am I missing? Or did I get it, and it just fell flat anyway?

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist
by Paulo Coelho, translated by Alan R.Clarke
read by Jeremy Irons
HarperAudio, 2000
4 discs (unabridged)

I am not sure I'm going to endear myself to people when I discuss this book. There are a lot of people who are very fond of it. I am not sure I am a fan. This book is pushy.

We read this for my adventurous genre book club. It was picked by the staff member who was covering my leave -- the second book she picked that I probably would not have (the first was horror by Stephen King, which despite my admiration for the man I just could. not. do.) And I'm really glad she was doing the picking, because I am not sure I ever would have gotten around to reading this if she hadn't, and it was a good choice, I think. Incidentally, the Stephen King was a great pick, too -- the group really enjoyed it, and we had an awesome discussion despite my wimpiness. I expect my group will have fun with this one too, but for different reasons.

On the surface, this is the story of Santiago (who is only given a name once, and thereafter referred to as "the boy"), a shepherd in Andalusia who has a recurring dream about treasure near the Pyramids. He drops everything and heads off to search for it, discovering that this search for treasure is his Personal Legend, meeting some interesting characters along the way, and learning rather a lot about life, the universe, and everything in the process.

And on the surface, I should love this. I love fantasies, I love fairytales, I'm a fan of a good quest story. But overall the effect is pretty meh. It's not the fault of the audiobook; good old Jeremy Irons does his best. It's not the fault of the simplicity of the tale, which I rather liked. It's not even the fault of the religious overtones (er, "overtones" is maybe an understatement). It's the fault of the author, who wouldn't get subtlety if it jumped up and bit him (subtly or otherwise). It's the fault of the Personal Legend and the fact that we are beaten about the head with the Message that if we are working towards our Personal Legend, all the universe will conspire to help us. And fine, agree with the Message or not, but please cease beating me with it. I get it.

What I want out of a book like this is a good story, even if it is bare-bones-simple as this one, and it doesn't have to be realistic. So I got that, and for that reason I managed to listen to the audiobook the whole way through without chucking it out the car window. The characters, even if they are just sketched in, are likable and/or interesting enough. They're a bit fairy-tale, in that they're mostly ciphers with a specific purpose in the story, but that has never stopped me. My imagination is well up to the task of filling in, in this particular kind of situation, and I actually quite liked Santiago, or who I imagined Santiago to be.

I am not against allegorical fiction. If there is a message, I am okay with that, if it is done properly. Properly means it doesn't take centre stage so often as to throw me out of the story and contemplation of what other things I might find inside. Properly means that the message is incorporated into the story in such a way that it feels comfortable and natural, an outgrowth of the story as opposed to ... whatever we got here. Here, the Message was brought up so often that it felt like neon signs were flashing: "Get it? Get it? There is a design! You only have to live your best life, follow your dreams, and good things will happen! See? See? Even if it's not easy, follow your dreams and good things will happen! YES? Get it? PERSONAL LEGEND! MAKTUB! ALSO LOVE! Do you see it?"

Which... yeesh. I don't like my fiction yelling at me. I don't find it inspiring at all.

I'm glad I listened to the audiobook, although maybe in the end that was a mistake too, because I do find that anything that recurs noticeably in a written text is magnified in an audiobook. But it was an easy listen, where I might have gotten frustrated with the read. Maybe I am too jaded at this time in my life, but I did a lot of eye-rolling and muttering, and while I was never fully irritated I did start to get there at points. Maybe that's a comment on me, and maybe I should be sad about that. On the other hand, I've read books with the same themes and the same message that didn't inspire the words "Oh, come on, really with this again?" repeatedly.

I wanted to like this book. There are things about it that are quite endearing, and I can see why it's managed to remain so popular. But it wasn't the right book for me.