Jessamy, for Timeslip Tuesday

Today's Timeslip Tuesday book is Jessamy, by Barbara Sleigh (1967, 246 pages of large type, middle grade). Peter shared a touching story about this book over at his blog, Collecting Children's Books, this past Sunday, and since I am lucky enough to have a copy, it seemed like a good time to feature it here (especially since it is one of my favorite timeslip stories).

Jessamy's lonely life is spent being shunted between two aunts, one in school time, one for vacations. Neither particularly wants her. So when Aunt Maggie, the vacation aunt, breaks the news to her that her own children have whooping cough, and that Jessamy will have to stay elsewhere, she is not particularly disappointed. Especially when the elsewhere turns out to be an old house, empty except for a caretaker and the memories the house still holds of the children who once lived there. While exploring the house, Jessamy's attention is caught by a tall cupboard in the old nursery. Opening the door, she finds the measuring marks of those children, with their names written next to them. And one of the names is her own.

That night, Jessamy can't sleep for wondering if she really saw her own name. Quietly she goes back upstairs, opens the cupboard...and finds that she has gone back in time, to 1914, and that she has just fallen from a tree, hurting her head badly (nicely smoothing out for her the difficulties concomitant with time travel). Here she has another aunt, the newly hired cook, who (for a change) is an aunt who loves her, and, in an equally pleasant turn of events, she has the companionship of the children of the house. It is for the most part a happy house. It is true, Fanny, the girl closest to Jessamy's own age, resents the intrusion of the cook's niece, but Kit, the youngest boy, soon becomes her close friend. For Jessamy, lonely no longer, the past seems like an awfully nice place to be.

Except for one thing. 1914, as Jessamy realizes, is not the best year to visit to the past. World War I has started, Harry, the eldest son of the house has left school to enlist, quarreling with his grandfather and storming off in the night, seemingly taking with him his grandfather's precious medieval book of hours. Jessamy, living in both the upstairs world of the family and the downstairs world of the staff, may be the only one able to solve the mystery and clear Harry's name.

Before she can do this, the cupboard sends her forward in time again. But her time in the present is made magical by her knowledge of the house's past, and free from Aunt Maggie's ideas of "suitable playmates," Jessamy befriends a boy who shares his name with a man she had met in the past.

And one day, the cupboard sends her back again. A year has past, and the mystery is still unsolved...and Harry's grandfather still will not allow his name to be spoken.

If I keep on writing, it will get spoilerish, so I shall stop now. But in case anyone is wondering, Jessamy solves the mystery and ends up in her own time, with a happy ending.

Peter referred to this as a "lesser known children's book", but over in the UK it is still rather well known and loved, especially by those who read it back in the 1960s and 70s, when they were children. Partly this is because it is so easy to empathize with likable, lonely Jessamy, partly because Sleigh does a marvellous job bringing the house and its family to life, and partly because the story is magical enough to fascinate, without being so complex as to befuddle. This is the sort of book that a certain type of 10 or 11 year old girl (who values character over action, who is imaginative and introspective) will find incredibly satisfying.

Sadly, it is not readily available anymore, because it's been out of print for a while. It's selling on Amazon for around $50, although there are slightly cheaper copies at Amazon UK (fifteen pounds). But lots of American libraries bought it in the late 1960s, so it might still be lingering in the obscure branches that haven't purged their collections much...It is worth looking for.

ps. Sorry for the small size of the picture. It is not a dog in a pink dress. It is a kneeling girl. But I wanted to show an edition other than the one at Peter's site. The edition I have is an even more miserable cover than either of these, being mostly puce. If I get around to it, I'll scan it, since it's nowhere to be found on line.

Ocean Hide and Seek for Nonfiction Monday

Ocean Hide and Seek, by Jennifer Evans Kramer, illustrated by Gary R. Phillips (Sylvan Dell, 2009).

Imagine a book about sea creatures that, on the one hand, is a soothing sea creature book to read at bedtime, and which, on the other hand, serves as a springboard to discussions not just of the creatures but of the poetic subtleties of language. Such a book is this one.


With each beautifully illustrated pair of pages featuring a rhyming, repetitive verse about a single sea creature, this book appears at first a peaceful introduction to the ways in which ocean animals hide themselves:

"Clownfish colors, orange and white-
orange and white, orange and white.
Seeking shelter, taking flight,
clownfish hiding in plain sight."

This is the good-for-bed-time-reading side of this book.

But other verses are more challenging. Here's the octopus:

"Clever arms that dip and sway-
dip and sway, dip and sway.
Like deadly sea snakes seeking prey,
predators soon swim away."

Not so bed-timish, but a good springboard for discussion about what a predator is (although kids today seem to know this by the time they're three), and also about similes--which the grown-up might need to explain.

The grown-up planning to read this book aloud would be advised to read the pages at the end first. Here, in very straightforward prose, the ways in which the various creatures hide in the sea are explained. Even for an educated adult, this book has challenging bits on first read--it helps, for instance, to know in advance from reading the back that some parrotfish "make a clear, mucus "sleeping bag" cocoon at night." Otherwise, when the fish is described as "a queen in her cocoon," everyone is at sea (pun intended)

Speaking from experience with the various children I've tried this book on (four of them), older kids might not care for the repetitive poetry, and younger kids might be baffled by the poetic descriptions. There's not much one can do about the former, but I think that if the adult reader and the child have the patience to talk about the book in depth (this pun just happened) as they read it the first time through, they will learn a lot, and the book might well become a welcomed bed-time story on subsequent reads.

The Non-fiction Monday Roundup is at Lori Calabrese Writes!

Hidden Voices, by Pat Lowery Collins

Hidden Voices: The Orphan Musicians of Venice, by Pat Lowery Collins (Candlewick, 2009, 352pp, YA).

This book arose from a snippet Collins chanced to hear on her local classical music station--that Vivaldi wrote countless concertos to be played by orphaned girls of Venice, giving the lucky ones a pathway to careers in music, or to rich husbands. From this fact, Collins built a fictional story of three of these orphans, brought up the Ospedale della Pieta, a home for abandoned female orphans. Not only were the girls well carred for, but any who showed any glimmer of musical aptitude had instruments put into their hands from the moment they could hold them.

Three first-person stories are told in this book--the stories of Rosalba, Anetta, and Luisa, age-mates at the brink of adulthood. Despite the sheltered privilege of their lives, and the genuine pleasure that music gives them, each one yearns for more than the orphanage can give. One, a beautiful oboist, craves Romance, pining over a handsome young man glimpsed from the orphanage window. One, gifted with an extraordinarily lovely voice, longs for the mother who abandoned her long ago. The mother, now a nobleman's courtesan, tempts her with dreams of a shared life, if she can become a famous opera singer. The third, a dedicated viola player, longs with sad persistance for the second girl to return the deep love she offers.

Reality breaks in, and the dreams of the three girls shatter, one suddenly and horribly, two more slowly. And all the while, Vivaldi--kind, distracted, asthmatic--writes beautiful music for them to play, for the privileged folk of Venice to hear.

Collins does a pretty good job, I think, making her girls real people set within the context of their own time (except I wonder, a bit, that religion is so little at the forefront of their minds, brought up, as they were, within a religious institution), and she does an excellent job making each girl a distinct personality (she does a nice job with Vivaldi too!). My only real quarrel with the book is one of style (but since I was reading the ARC, I don't know quite how the final version will read). For the most part, Collins eschews contractions, and so the prose felt a tad heavy and slow at times, especially for first-person narration. Contractions that do suddenly appear are a tad jarring by contrast. Once I had accepted this, however, I had no trouble becoming interested in three intertwined stories.

This is a book I would heartily recommend for the following categories of reader:

--those who love Vivaldi in particular, or baroque music, who will appreciate the knowledge Collins brings to bear on the subject
--anyone interested in the history of women in music
--those who were or are dedicated young musicians, like the girls in the book
--those who love stories of girls in confined settings (such as boarding schools and convents)
--those who love historical fiction where the characters are central, and history is writ small (no kings or queens or epic wars etc.)
--and finally, those who love Venice. Even though seen, for the most part, through the windows of the orphanage, Venice is at the heart of the story.

At Journey of a Bookseller there's another review of Hidden Voices, and an ARC being given away (I guess it's still open, cause it doesn't say it isn't). I won't be offering mine here, because I already have a friend who meets three of the above criteria in mind for it.

As an added bonus, I am infinitely more interested in Vivaldi's music than I was last month, now that I know so much more of the circumstances in which it was born. Anyone looking for a very fine present to give could combine this book very nicely with a Vivaldi cd--I myself wish I had something besides The Four Seasons on hand, and in my mind, for that matter!

Hidden Voices will be released May 12, 2009.

Kin (The Good Neighbors Book 1), by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh

Kin (The Good Neighbors, Book 1), a graphic novel by Holly Black and Ted Naifeh (Graphix 2008, p 117, YA).

Here's a graphic novel that combines urban fairies, a suspenseful mystery, and dark family secrets with dark and brooding drawings. It was a finalist for the Cybils Awards in the YA Graphic Novel category, recommendation enough to tempt even a non-graphic novel reader such as myself (so what follows is reaction rather than review).

Rue's life has imploded. Her mother has been gone for three weeks, and now her father is in jail, a suspect in both the mother's disappearance and in the murder of one of his college students. On top of that, she has begun to see things--strange things. Fairy things, but, this being Holly Black of Tithe fame, these are not Flower Fairies at the bottom of the garden. Quite the opposite. And one of the most un-Flower-Fairy-like of these creatures is claiming to be her missing mother's father, and is challenging Rue to embrace the non-human side of her own nature. The human/fairy city that Rue now inhabits is dissolving into chaos too, with impossible vines engulfing its buildings. Rue is faced with the mother (pun intended) of all identity crises. In her own words: "A lot of kids have this fantasy that secretly they're really the princess of a foreign country. Turns out that pretty much sucks" (p. 79).

The graphic novel formal works well for Rue's story. Sharing Rue's visual field, the reader begins to see the strange fantastic others without knowing who they are and what they mean, coming face to face with strange and scary things along with her. And because the story is broken up into frames (it is, after all, a graphic novel), which feels like a very jumpy way of story-telling to me, I felt that I shared Rue's confusion and lack of a coherent reality in a very immediate, empathetically engaged way. This is not by any means a suggestion that Black is not telling a coherent story--she is, and I thought it was an interesting one, although not wildly original. However, I think my confusion was in large part my own problem rather than an extension of Rue's, perhaps because I have too a hard time taking my eyes off the words to read any graphic novel easily. But it was a feeling that seemed to suit the story.

Just out of curiosity--do any other really fast readers out there have terrible trouble reading slowly enough to look at the pictures in graphic novels? I get so caught up in reading the story that I forget that the pictures are telling the story too. So I end up confused. I am also uncertain about what makes the illustrations of a graphic novel Good, because, like I said, I have trouble stopping to look at them. In this case, they are pretty dark, literally, so it required even more work to see what the heck was happening than is necessary for, say, Jellaby, the one graphic novel that I truly love*. I am never going to raise my hand to be on the Cybils graphic novel panel.

My conclusion--I didn't mind reading it at all, and it is easy to imagine lots of urban-fairy-book-loving people who will love it. I'll probably read the second book, but I'm not panting to. Maybe I should practice first. Perhaps one graphic novel a month, building up to one a week...

Writer Zack Smith has a great interview with Holly Black where they chat about how this book came to be, and at Tor there's a fascinating look at the 19th-century murder of a suspected changeling that inspired Black.

Other reviews and comments can be found at:

The Excelsior File
Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Mrs. Hill's Book Blog
Gail Gauthier's Original Content
Read About Comics

and many more places. It's a fascinatingly mixed bag...

ps: here's something I hate that seems to be prevalent in the graphic novel genre. It is really hard to tell what is the title of the book and what is the title of the series. I think the book title should be bigger than the series title. I could have sworn I was reading a book called The Good Neighbors, first in a series called Kin. Hmph. But is that pathetically last year/decade/century of me?

*and speaking of Jellaby (which was also a Cybils finalist), Jellaby: Monster in the City is coming out April 21st...

A Damarian teaser from Robin McKInley

I imagine I am not the only person who, while enjoying all the books that Robin McKinley sends our way, wonders a little wistfully if we will ever be taken back to Damar (the world of The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown).

McKinley most recently went there in a lovely story in Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits, an anthology written with her husband, Peter Dickinson, and I have an unsubstantiated hope that the next anthology, Fire (which is in the works), will perhaps, maybe, have a Damar story.

It's not that McKinley didn't try. On her blog, she just posted the news that the manuscript of her first try at Damar book number 3 turned up, and she's put the beginning up on the site...


Postscript: While looking for a picture of Water, I came across the Australian covers, and was particularly struck by the differences in Dragonhaven:

Timeslip Tuesday -- A Traveller in Time

A Traveller in Time, by Alison Uttley, is a classic timeslip story. It's an early one-1939, but has been reissued several times, most recently in 2007 by Jane Nissen Books, whose mission is to bring classic children's books back into print (hooray for that! and for the fact that the dollar is almost fifty cents stronger against the pound than it has been).

In early 20th century England, two sisters and a brother are sent from their London home to stay with relatives at a farm in far-off Derbyshire. The youngest, Penelope, has always had a touch of second-sight, and here, in the ancient manor house where her family has lived for centuries, she begins to catch glimpses of people from the past. And then she herself travels back to the age of Queen Elizabeth. There is her aunt, working in the kitchen, who accepts her as a niece newly come from London. In what is one of the easiest time travel experiences I've ever encountered, Penelope is able to fit in, with little questioning, into the Elizabethan household, moving gently back and forth between past and present with no awkward outside mechanism.

It is a household under strain. The Babbingtons, whose manor it is, are Catholic supporters of Mary, Queen of Scotts, imprisoned nearby. Anthony, the head of the family, is her fervent supporter, scheming to free her. Penelope becomes caught up in the Babbington's partisanship, and although she knows that Mary's story does not end well, each time she travels back into the past the present seems cloudier...until she is almost more at home back then, befriending Anthony's younger brother, affectionately looked out for by her "aunt," and becoming more involved in the Babbingtons' plot to free the queen.

"Somehow, in the serenity of the sunny, bare chamber where we stood, with Master Anthony's blue eyes looking into mine, and that lovely jewel dangling in his fingers touching mine as he spoke, I felt all things were possible. We would put back the clock of time and save her.

He took my hands in his, and held them tightly.

"You want to save her? I can trust you with my heart? You love her too, Penelope?" he whispered.

"Oh yes, Master Anthony," I cried passionately. "I love her too," and my words were true." (page 108 of the Puffin version, the ugliest cover of the three I found, and the one I own).

Alison Uttley is a slow and generous story teller. Her descriptions are thick, and her attention to physical detail acute. Both the Elizabethan manor and the early twentieth-century farm come to vivid life. The story is told in the first person, allowing Penelope's feelings to come through clearly, and she is a likable, trustworthy narrator, but she seemed to me to exist more to be an observer of the Babbingtons than her own person. I think (supported by various reviews on Amazon, and comments of acquaintances) that if this is one you read at a child, at that impressionable age when a story can easily become a Story, it is one that will be loved. As a grown-up, it felt a bit slow, a bit loose around the edges of its time-travelling. I would, quite frankly, have liked to have seen more of the "three children at an old farm" story-line, although I realize that Uttley was not writing that book, and so it is not a valid criticism. But still, this is a book well worth reading.

Not least for its educational aspects (and for those of us who learn history best through fiction, this is important). Anthony Babbington was a real person, who really did give his heart to Mary, Queen of Scots, at the cost of his own life. His home, so lovingly described by Uttley, still stands, and is now a bed- and-breakfast:

The Norton Award short list

Here's the short list for this year's Andre Norton Award. It 's nice to see three old friends I helped shortlist for the Cybils (the first three), and perhaps even nicer to see two other excellent books gets some recognition.

Graceling - Kristin Cashore (Harcourt, Oct 08)

Lamplighter - D.M. Cornish (Monster Blood Tattoo, Book 2, Putnam Juvenile, May 08)

Savvy - Ingrid Law (Dial, May 08)

The Adoration of Jenna Fox - Mary E. Pearson (Henry Holt and Company, April 08)

Flora’s Dare: How a Girl of Spirit Gambles All to Expand Her Vocabulary, Confront a Bouncing Boy Terror, and Try to Save Califa from a Shaky Doom (Despite Being Confined to Her Room) - Ysabeau S. Wilce (Harcourt, Sep08)


The Andre Norton Award is the Nebula Award given to the author of an outstanding young adult science fiction or fantasy book published in the previous year. The award is rather young—only three books to date have won it:

2007 Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, by JK Rowling
2006 Magic or Madness, by Justine Larbalestier
2005 Valiant: A Modern Tale of Faerie , by Holly Black

All fantasy, with just one Sci. Fi. Book on this year’s short list (Jenna Fox).

Science-Fiction for Teens--what new books are out there?

Anyone interested in science-fiction for teens should read this article--The Campaign for Shiny Futures, by Farah Mendlesohn, published (and available online here) in this month's Horn Book.

After reading this, I began to wonder what science-fiction books marketed for teens are out, or coming out, in 2009? Mendlesohn's bibliography includes one 2009 title-- Before the Storm, by Sean McMullen. I'm reading one right now-- The Rule of Clawby John Brindley. There's another Softwire book coming in April--The Softwire: Worm Hole Pirates on Orbis 3 (wild space adventure for middle grade kids and younger teens), and coming in May, there's Hunger: A Gone Novel. There's also the new Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy book, which Eoin Colfer is writing -- And Another Thing...

This is all I came up with after some brisk googling, and it's a pretty paltry list compared with the riches of forthcoming fantasy.

Trisha came up with a few others: Patrick Ness' The Ask and the Answer, sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go, Scott Westerfeld's Leviathan, and Kenneth Oppel's Starclimber. It still seems an awfully short list...it is no wonder the Norton Award is so heavily weighted in favor of fantasy (see post above).

And I've added two more that sound more sci fi than fantasy, both by debut authors and both coming this fall--Teri Hall's The Line and Pam Bachorz's Candor.

That makes ten.

Using wall demolition to promote literacy

I am so excited. I do not think that anyone has ever before thought of this particular Exciting Way to Promote Literacy! (I could be wrong)--start knocking down your house!

Yesterday we demolished a large piece of wall. The wretched people who lived in our 150 year-old house before us had build a cupboard blocking the way from the kitchen to the dining room; a box that stuck out a foot and a half into the dining room. Yuck. So we destroyed it. And then it was clear that they had committed other malfeasances...before we knew it, we were down to a large area of bare lathe.

The children were thrilled. Even more so when I suggested that they write letters to put in the walls (not that anyone would ever need to demolish our handiwork). So for half an hour they were busy writing--painless and pleasurable literacy practice.

And won't the people in the future be thrilled when they find little notes in the wall saying, "You are stupid!"

Fortune's Magic Farm, by Suzanne Selfors

Fortune's Magic Farm, by Suzanne Selfors (Little Brown 2009, 264pp)--released today!

Once the town was called Sunny Cove. Now it is Runny Cove, where the rain never stops. No sun has ever shone on ten year-old Isabelle, as she hurries to and from Mr. Supreme's Umbrella Factory, where almost all the townsfolk work. Everything has always been gray and mouldy and slug-strewn.

Except for the apple, a thing of beauty, that an elephant seal spits out at Isabelle one fateful day when she wanders down to the dismal town beach.

Isabelle's grandmother is sick, perhaps dying. The greedy umbrella factory owner is making his virtually-enslaved workers work even longer hours. Mama Lu, owner of the boarding house where Isabelle lives, has discovered Isabella's pet slugs, with disastrously salty consequences. It will take more than an apple, however beautiful, to put things right with Isabelle and her miserable town. It will take a whole garden.

Unable to stand her miserable town any longer, Isabelle journeys across the ocean (on the back of the same obliging elephant seal) to a paradise--a garden of wonderful delight, protected by magic from the greedy eyes of Mr. Supreme and his ilk. This is Fortune's magic farm, a nature preserve of magical plants (curative cherries, floating fronds, vice vines, magnetic mangoes and the like). It is Isabelle's birthright, and her responsibility.

But how can she enjoy paradise while the rain keeps falling on Runny Cove? Especially when she learns that her own parents, whom she never knew, were implicated in its disastrous fall into dampness? Keeping the farm going is vitally important--its plants exist no where else. But surely it is also important to help others (and Selfors does a very nice job with Isabelle's internal struggle here).

I enjoyed this one, especially the dystopia for the young reader that is Runny Cove. Unlike Isabelle, I was a little disappointed when the story took us off to Fortune's farm, where, instead of slugs and evil boarding house matrons, we encountered the pleasures of a sunny garden filled with whimsical magical plants. Maybe I'm just too cynical to enjoy whimsical magical plants, but the wonderful farm never felt as real as the miserable town. However, doubtless the target audience of ten year-oldish girls will find the garden delightful...

My dear husband accuses me, with some justice, of perpetrating gender stereotypes here. In my defense, even though there is a strong supporting character who is a boy, I doubt that any ten year-old male will be drawn to a book whose cover features a pink and purple umbrella, lots of pretty flowers, and a cute fuzzy animal. And a girl. So I will passing this book along to my public library, where it can find its female readership. Any time my husband wants to convince our boys to read it, he is welcome too...

Edited to add--well, I'm wrong here. In Fuse #8's review, she mentions a boy reader who enjoyed this a lot. It just goes to show. Maybe the slugs at the beginning will draw the boys in...

Fellow fans of The Explosionist will share my pleasure

in the news that Jenny Davidson has finished writing its sequel, The Snow Queen! I am just anxious as all get out to read it.

Here's a blurb about it, from a post she put up on Friday at the HarperTeen Myspace site:

"The book takes up with Sophie in Copenhagen at the alternate-universe version of Niels Bohr’s Institute for Theoretical Physics, which was possibly the most exciting of all possible places to be in our own world’s real historical 1930s, and follows her on a strange and stressful journey first to Sweden and then up north to Lappland and the island of Spitsbergen, where she encounters the Snow Queen in her ice palace."

I would never have guessed, never, that the sequel to The Explosionist would be based on a fairy tale...I am now trying to imagine cover art for it that would convey "based on a fairy tale" while staying true to the look/feel of the first book's cover. It might not be hard. This Sophie always did look a tad too fairy-tale princess like for my taste, given that she's still a school girl:

poor poor abandoned books...

This is not my living room.

It is a warehouse of books, abandoned and left to starve by their cruel owner, and now being saved. Except for the ones that are being stepped on.

The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton

Every summer for years I would resolve to read my way through all the books in the children's room at the library. Mostly I started, sheep-like, at A. Sometimes, in a fit of wild rebellion, I would start at Z. The result is that my acquaintance with authors whose names begin with L, M, and N is slight (apart from the obvious ones), and I missed out on a lot of books I would really have enjoyed.

For instance, last week I read for the first time The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton (HarperCollins 1962, 256 pp), after an on-line acquaintance described it as one of her absolutely most favorite childhood books. I don't know if I would have loved it quite that much, but it would have been right up my alley.

Eddy and Eleanor Hall are orphans, living with their aunt and uncle in an old Victorian house in Concord, Massachusetts. Money is tight, and the bank is threatening to take the house from them. But one day, exploring the far reaches of the upper attic, the children find a wondrous attic room full of the relics of two other children, another brother and sister who vanished mysteriously years ago. There Eleanor and Eddy find a series of riddles scratched onto the window glass, that lead them on a mysterious hunt for both treasure and the lost children...

The episodes where the children journey into strange nightmares in search of the treasure were magical and gripping. What makes this book one I really enjoyed, however, was the juxtaposition of the fantasy sequences with the real-life efforts (all futile and fraught) of the children to solve the riddle. The result is a book that is a bit like Elizabeth Enright's Spiderweb for Two with magic thrown in....

This is the first of several books about the Hall family, which makes me happy now, looking forward to reading them, but would have made me even happier then, when it was beginning to seem that I had read everything the library held of interest. Of course, they may not have been in my library. Are there any other loyal patrons of the Arlington Virginia Central Branch from the 1970s and 1980s out there who remember these???

Well. Now I am very surprised. Because the most recent book of the Hall Family Chronicles, the eight instalment, could not have been in my childhood library, because it was published last summer-The Dragon Tree. I am glad that I never got around to reading it when I brought it home from the library last fall...now I will read it in its proper place.

I have also just learned that I actually had read one of the Hall Family books already--book number 4, The Fledgling(1980), which was a Newbery Honor book. Maybe it will make more sense once I've read books 2 and 3. Or maybe it is simply as strange as I vaguely remember it being...

You know that article about cluttered houses

hurting the development of children reading-wise? I saw it linked to yesterday at a couple of blogs, and left somewhat sneering comments, and smugly went down to read to my children, nimbly avoiding the clutter that makes walking around in my living room so enriching.

But then I couldn't find the book we were in the middle of reading.

The Clutter had gotten it. And since a good bit of the clutter is piles of books, it is hard to find the one small paperback that one is looking for.

Perhaps the article is right.

The Goblin King--Twisted Journeys #10

I vividly remember my first Choose Your Own Adventure Book (The Forbidden Castle, published way back in 1982), mainly because I chose correctly every time and ended up safely home again, unlike my sisters, who died. Most of the endings, if I remember correctly, lead to Death.

The same concept of reader directed story has been given new life in the Twisted Journey Series (Graphic Universe/Lerner), with a much more interesting half text/half colorful graphic novel format, and, speaking from limited experience, less death. I recently read the tenth of the series, The Goblin King (by Alaya Johnson, illustrated by Meg Gandy, 2009), and out of the ten different endings I reached, I only died once (she says proudly)!

The Goblin King is a fantasy adventure that's exciting without being scary, casting the reader as a kid on a school trip to a Scotland where the magical realm of fairie is very real. I fought in a battle against goblins, risked my life by agreeing to answer a dragon's riddle, was transformed into a frog, and tried to save a selkie...

Even more fun than reading this to myself was watching my 8 year old read it. Because there are so many endings, he kept going back to it, without loosing interest halfway and putting it down forever, as sadly happens with so many other books. I'm sure another part of its appeal was the way the narrative is split into pages of straight text and pages of graphics--the visuals offer a pleasant break from concentrated reading. The "you" is never shown, allowing readers to be themselves (my first time through, I was given the opportunity to chose exactly the path that I would have followed in real life, which, I am happy to say, worked out for me). Probably some of the words were to hard for my third grader (Lerner rates the series at the fourth grade reading level, and indeed, I had no problems), but here again the graphics helped to keep him reading.

After the (hopefully) successful completion of our next library book sale, I shall ask our children's librarian if she would like to buy more Twisted Journeys for the library (although I am a little leery of Number 9, "Agent Mongoose and the Hypno-Beam Scheme"). And if we just happen to be the first patrons to check them out, so be it...

Here's the riddle the dragon asked me:

I went and I got it.
I sat and I sought it.
When I couldn't find it,
I brought it home.

I didn't know the answer...

Timeslip Tuesday-- Harding's Luck, by E. Nesbit

On Tuesdays, I try to write about timeslip stories. If anyone else would like to join me, I would love the company and will add links. Coincidentally, I do have another time travel post to link to today--over at The Spectacle there's an interesting post about time travel from a sci fi perspective.

My own Timeslip Tuesday book for today is Harding's Luck, by E. Nesbit (1909) a companion/sequel to The House of Arden.

Harding's Luck is a rather unusual Nesbit, in that it tells of an only child--Dickie Harding, living on sufferance with an uncaring woman who injured him so badly as a child that he needs a crutch to walk. With no bantering siblings to lighten things up, and real poverty, as opposed to the struggling intelligentsia found in many of her books, Nesbit has set her sights on a more serious book than her others.

"...there were no green things growing in the garden at the back of the house where Dickie lived with his aunt. There were stones and bones, and bits of brick, and dirty old dish-cloths matted together with grease and mud, worn-out broom-heads and broken shovels, a bottomless pail, and the mouldy remains of a hutch where once rabbits had lived. But that was a very long time ago, and Dickie had never seen the rabbits. A boy had brought a brown rabbit to school once, buttoned up inside his jacket, and he had let Dickie hold it in his hands for several minutes before the teacher detected its presence and shut it up in a locker till school should be over. So Dickie knew what rabbits were like. And he was fond of the hutch for the sake of what had once lived there."

But Dickie sows some seeds in the back bit of earth...and finds that one has grown into a moonflower:


The seeds of the flower, combined with the silver rattle that is his one personnel possession, will take Dickie far from London.

But before the magic begins, a friendly seeming tramp takes him off to beg for a living outside the city. Sleeping outside in the "bed with green curtains" seems wonderful to Dickie, and he finds in the man someone close to a father. True, this is a father that wants him to be an accomplice in a robbery, but one who has grown fond of him as well.

Then time-travelling magic takes Dickie back three hundred years in time, to a life where he is loved, privileged, and no longer lame. There he meets two other children from modern times--Elfrida and Edred Arden (as also told in The House of Arden), whom he will later meet in the present as well.

Yet back in London his "father" is waiting for him, along with all the poverty and physical pain of Dickie's real life. Dickie strikes a balance between past and present, always forcing himself home to see that the man he has adopted is making progress on the path to the settled, uncriminal life that Dickie wants for him. But this balance is disrupted when Dickie learns that he himself has a place in the present time that can give him as much happiness as the past does--he just has to push aside new friends to claim it.

This is, quite frankly, not Nesbit's best book. It's pretty forced, and pretty improbable. Dickie is recognized everywhere as being better than your typical poor boy--you know, the nobleness of spirit shining out from eyes too big for the frail body type, who has taught himself excellent diction and vocabulary through judicious reading surreptitiously carried out in a London slum. The tramp, too, turns out to be better than your average tramp--he is Good at Heart, and just needs the steadying influence that a small boy with nobility of spirit can provide. It ends up a bit preachy. The magic here is also not Nesbit's best. It feels a bit like she herself was loosing interest, so she added on to the magic in awkward ways (for instance, we now have three incarnations of Magic Mole, as opposed to the one featured in the first book). Here is the grandest of the three, the Mouldiwarpest:


Very odd.

The time travelling here is a secondary feature--it's a device to provide Dickie with a Paradisal Alternative to his present, both refuge and temptation. It's the easiest time travel experience I've ever read about, with ever possible problem glossed over by a helpful magical nurse.

Despite all this, it is still a Nesbit. And so, worth reading. I did not mind at all re-reading it in preparation for writing this, although it did prove a tricky book to summarize (which is why there was a three week gap).

You can read Harding's Luck on line here, complete with the original illustrations.



Spoiler:



As far as time travelling goes, Nesbit creates a serious and unresolved problem. What the heck happens to the 17th-century boy when the 20th-century one takes his place forever at the end?

6 books that make me happy

I’ve been tagged by Melissa at Book Nut with the Six Things That Make You Happy Meme, which makes me happy, but I’m going to change it, so as to be a bit more on topic, to six books that make me happy.

My six are a mix of old favorites and new discoveries—books I’m glad are in the world and books I’m glad to be reading now.

1. Ten Apples Up on Top. No matter how many times I read this book, the expressions on the animals' faces, especially the dog’s (see above), make me happy. It is brilliant.

2. The Blue Sapphire, by D.E. Stevenson. Jen has talked in the past about her fondness for D.E. Stevenson’s book, Listening Valley. Although I like that one too, The Blue Sapphire is my favorite Stevenson comfort read. It’s plot is not much—girl strikes out on her own, finds job selling hats (which is a lot of fun to read about), gets a stock market tip from a handsome stranger that leads to a solid chunk of money, heads off to Scotland to visit ailing uncle, redecorates his house, finds romance…yeah. Whatever. But believe me, it is truly comforting book.

3. My Family and Other Animals. Gerald Durrell is a favorite author of mine to read when things are grey and despondent. In this book, he combines the sunshine of an idyllic Corfu, a wonderfully insane family, and natural history to create a perfect comfort read.

4. Poison Study, by Maria Snyder. I had read quite a few mentions of this in various blogs, all recommending it. I shall now recommend it too, to anyone looking for a really gripping, really interesting, really good “girl discovering secret powers while a victim of adverse circumstances book.” It makes me happy to think that when I go home in a few hours I will be curling up with it again…

5. What Darwin Saw: The Journey That Changed the World, by Rosalyn Schanzer. A wonderful picture book, that uses Darwin’s own words to tell what he saw. It is so gratifying to bring home a book that is an acceptable offering for one’s eight year old, as this one was. Few things beat seeing your child quietly reading to himself. (Although this morning my boys played their first board game (Parcheesi) alone!!! Without a parent! Without fighting!).

6. And finally, here’s a nod to the small but significant group of books in my possession that make me happy even though I try not to ever open them—the Valuable Ones. One in particular that makes me happy is my first edition copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as illustrated by Arthur Rackham. I worked my tale off for this book about 15 years ago, when I was a poor graduate student, scrounging at library book sales for anything I though could remotely be traded in for book store credit at my local used book store. It took about two years, but finally I had enough in credit to be able to afford the balance. At last it was mine…However, the owner of the book store kind of hinted that he didn’t want me to do it again. And I haven’t…but oh my gosh it is a lovely book.

And here are the six people I'm tagging next, either for the original version or the books version: Sheila at Wands and Worlds, Anamaria at Books Together, Sibylle at In Training for a Heroine, Els at Librarian Mom, Em at Em's Bookshelf, and Jen, at Jen Robinson's Book Page.

Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand, by Louise Hawes

No sooner do I establish in my mind two categories for re-written fairy tales, those that re-tell vs those that re-imagine (see this post), then I find myself reading a book that defies tidy inclusion in either. The book is Black Pearls: A Faerie Strand, by Louise Hawes, with illustrations by Rebecca Guay (Houghton Mifflin, 2008, 211pp, YA). Hawes takes one nursery rhyme (Banbury Cross) and six fairy tales (old chestnuts such as Cinderella and Snow White), and makes them new by shifting perspective. For instance, she gives us Cinderella after the ball, as experienced by the prince, Snow White as seen by one of the dwarfs, and the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, from the point of view of the singing harp (I really liked this one, never before having wondered exactly who this harp person was). Through this shifting of focus, she allows herself room to add depth and nuance to happily ever after, and the chance to give human emotions, and human pasts and futures, to the fairy tale characters.

As the title suggests, Hawes is not shining light into these stories to make them sparkle in a pretty fairy dust way, but rather to revel dark layers and complexities. This darkness is nicely judged--not so much as to induce prurient squirming or sick horror, but enough to rivet and disturb.

These stories are more than re-tellings (even though Hawes sticks closely to her source material), but they aren't quite re-imaginings (despite the added richness of Hawes' telling, the stories are still quite recognizably themselves, and didn't take me, at least, into new territory. It's harder to do this with short stories, which is why I, in general, prefer novels). What they are, in the end, are fascinating stories, well told, to which are joined some beautiful black and white drawings (the only one of Guay's illustrations that I really don't care for is the cover one...). I imagine that those who like re-written fairy tales will love this book, and even those who don't, particularly, might well like the stories for their own sakes.

Here's another, longer, review at Tempting Persephone

This is funny

I am a bit hesitant to post this, because I don't want to bury the review I just lovingly wrote. So please scroll down and read that too if you haven't already.

But I couldn't resist.

I was just browsing at a new to me site, The Spectacle, where "Authors talk about writing speculative fiction for teens and pre-teens," and I found this. Click through to see what Harry Potter and The Bad Beginning would look like as Penguin Classics...

The Farwalker's Quest, by Joni Sensel

The Farwalker's Quest, by Joni Sensel
(Bloomsbury, 2009, 384 pp- released yesterday!)

After the Blind War ended, no person left on Earth could see. Slowly, new skills arose that kept a small population alive --ways of knowing the world through inner powers. By the time sighted children began to be born again, the new ways of being had become firmly set, and Finders, Tree-Singers, Farwalkers and other folk with magical skills were part of life. But that was years ago, and now there are no more Farwalkers to forge ties between distant places, and people have retreated into small settlements with almost no connections between them. The technological wonders of the past are a thing of myth, and the Vault that some say holds these lost treasures is thought by most to be a story for children.

In one small village, a girl named Ariel and her friend Zeke are about to leave school, Zeke to follow his father's path as a tree-singer, Ariel to follow her mother's path as a Healer. But a chance climb into Zeke's tree leads her to a telling dart caught in its branches--a strange relic of the past.

Strangers follow it, Finders who have come to claim it, bringing death to the children's village. And Ariel and Zeke become caught up in a dangerous quest to discover the message that the dart was carrying, journeying farther than they had ever imagined existed, with their lives at risk every step of the way. As they struggle to elude their pursuers and solve the riddle of the telling dart (helped along the way by a friendly ghost), they discover truths about themselves and their world that will make it impossible to ever go home again...

This is a truly riveting story. Plot-wise, it may sound like your basic quest, but Sensel has made her story something fresh and engrossing with her skillful characterizations and able world building. The ending is a tad unsatisfactory, for a variety of reasons that I won't say anything about because I don't want to be spoilerish. But it wasn't so unsatisfactory as to ruin the book. (edited to add--a large part of my vague dissatisfaction came from the fact that it is not clear in the book that there will be a sequel, and I felt left hanging. But this is actually the start of a series, with the next book coming in 2010! Goody!).

Because there's some scary violent bits, this might not be one to give to younger children, but for a sixth grade boy or girl on up, it should work nicely.

other reviews: Becky's Book Reviews, Joelle Anthony's Blog

While looking for other reviews, I came across a post by Sensel at The Spectacle (which is a site I'm going to add to my blog roll right now), where she shares this snippet that I find very amusing:

"First teen reader: Matt, the son of a friend. He was 13 at the time and thought the MC, Ariel, “should have more weapons.” (Sorry, Matt. IMO, it didn’t fit her character.)"

Despite her lack of weaponry, Ariel is a kick-ass heroine...and you can read the first chapter of her adventures here!