The latest on lead in books

Here's the latest AP article about lead and libraries...

But what are used book stores doing?

Silent Echoes for Timeslip Tuesday

Intrigued by the description of this book over at Book Moot, I sought out Silent Echoes, by Carla Jablonski (Razorbill, 2007, 344pp) for this week's Timeslip Tuesday book.

In late 19th-century New York, sixteen-year old Lucy and her father make their living through Spiritualism, with Lucy playing the role of the medium. It is not much of a living, but preying on the rich and gullible keeps them from poverty, and Lucy has the patter down pat.

"She shut her eyes and went back into her trance routine. She threw in a few moans to cover the rumbling of her empty stomach.

"Is anyone there who wold like to make contact?" she called out. "Spirits! Speak to me!"

"Help me," a voice replied.

Lucy sat bolt upright in her chair, her skin suddenly cold with shock.

"Help me," the voice repeated. A voice not her own. A girl's voice, a voice that didn't belong to anyone in the room. "Why won't anyone help me?"

At first, it is this "spirit" who helps Lucy. Lucy's predictions, based on the knowledge of the future that it shares with her, bring in more money than she and her father have ever made before, and the attentions of a rich, young man...

Gradually, Lucy begins to understand that this voice is not a ghostly spirit. Somehow, she has heard Lindsay, a modern New York girl, desperate for help. Her alcoholic mother and violent step-father are making Lindsay's life intolerable, and things are about to get worse for her. Although contact with Lindsay has improved Lucy's life, hearing voices lands Lindsay a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

When the girls realize that they have forged a bond across time, Lucy in the past begins to see what she must do to help Lindsay, while learning how best to live her own life.

Timeslip-wise, there was one thing I found strange. The girls are able to hear each other when they are in the same physical place, which is fine. But then newspapers from the present slip backwards into the past, inexplicably...

I found Lindsay's life in the present--her problems, her actions with regard to Lucy--fascinating. Lucy's side of things I found less believable, as she didn't seem to know all that much about life in her own time and place. Lucy was made even less convincing at times when the author seemed to use her as an audience for instructional digressions into life for poor women in the nineteenth-century. I don't mind in the least historical fiction that instructs, but it is tricky, I think, to slip the instruction in so subtly that it does not distract.

Still, an enjoyable read.

This is my 21st Timeslip Tuesday review! I'm happy to link to any other timeslip reviews, so let me know...

What Darwin Saw: the Journey that Changed the World

In the past few weeks, I have had the very great pleasure of reading What Darwin Saw: The Journey That Changed the World, by Rosalyn Schanzer (Smithsonian: 2009, ages 8-adult). First I read it out loud to my boys, and then again to myself. I had the great pleasure of watching my eight-year old poring over it repeatedly, and finally, I've read it a third time today. I do not remember ever being so very impressed by a non-fiction picture book in my life (I am pretty sure I mean this).

What Darwin Saw tells how young Darwin travelled around the world in the 1830s, and the strange, wonderful, and sometimes scary things he saw. It takes him home to England, where he spent the rest of his life creating a new theory of how life on earth has changed over the millenia. The book is part narration by the author, part snippets from Darwin's journals and letters, and part notes of explanation.

Maybe I loved this book so much because of the beautiful illustrations. This is a non-fiction picture book of the best kind, where what is shown is both compliment to and continuation of the words. From full-paged panoramic landscapes to close up scientific details, Schanzer has given us a huge variety of enchanting pictures to pore over and delight in (click here to see one of the most beautiful).

Maybe it was the story-line. The adventurous journey around the world, the strange things seen, the marvels that Darwin witnessed, told in large part through his own words: "We climbed up to rough mass of greenstone which crowns the summit of Bell Mountain. this rock was shattered into huge angular fragments, some appearing as if broken the day before, whilst on others, lichens had long grown. I so fully believed that this was owing to frequent earthquakes that I felt inclined to hurry from each loose pile" (page 21).

Maybe it was because Darwin makes a surprisingly great hero. Adventurous and curious, his delight in what he sees is profound. Thoughtful and determined, he is a great role model for the young (and for the rest of us too) when he comes back to England, carefully piecing together the clues on which he will build his scientific edifice (I can imagine holding him up as an example to my children when they rush through their own homework. I can imagine this having no effect....)

And I know that I loved the clear prose with which Schanzer narrates and explains Darwin's voyage and his theories about evolution. Simple enough so that an eight year old can follow, complex enough so that the adult reader does not feel patronized.

But I think that the biggest reason why I was so enraptured is that this book is a celebration of all the wonderful forms of life with which we share our planet. In Darwin's words, quoted by Schanzer, "From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved."


Schanzer, incidentally, deals with the 19th-century conflict between those who accepted evolution with those who could not reconcile the words of the Bible and Darwin's theory. She does not touch on the debates that are still on-going.

Here's a link to Schanzer talking about the evolution of her book, at I.N.K. (Interesting Non-fiction for Kids, which is a great blog).

Here's another review at Muddy Puddle Musings. I was surprised I didn't find, in the five minutes or so I had on hand to spend link-looking any other reviews, any more that were more substantial than mentions....if you reviewed this, let me know and I'll add the link!

This is my contribution to today's Non-Fiction Monday; the roundup is being hosted today by L.L. Owens.

The Dolphin Crossing, thoughts on endings and the Toothfairy, and other YA Dunkirk books

The Dolphin Crossing, by Jill Paton Walsh (first published in 1967, 134 pages).

It is the spring of 1940. The British army are in France, trying to hold back the German advance. In a small village in the east of England, two teenage boys--one from a family of land owning locals, one an evacuee from London--are making friends. Pat and his stepmother, who is expecting a baby any day, had not been given a kindly welcome when they arrived from London. Instead, they had been grudgingly given the shelter of a derelict railway carriage, surrounded by cows. John, lonely, compassionate, and a bit bored, decides that his family's unused barn would make a better place to live. Working together to make the barn habitable, the boys are glad to have something productive to do while the worry of the war drags on.

But one day, they see a line of little boats heading out to sea, toward France, and they hear the story of the British army trapped on the beaches across the channel. So John and Pat, who had never even seen the sea before he left London, set out in John's little boat, Dolphin, on the same night that Pat's sister is being born. They are determined to save as many men as they can, and for the next few days they mechanically ferry boat load after boat load of men from the beach to the offshore naval vessels. Boats next to theirs are blown up, and machine gun fire from the Germans rakes across their bow. Still they keep going, back and forth, and still there are men on the beach, waiting (and I, at this point, am sniffing a bit--Dunkirk always makes me sniff).

So much of what I know of history I learned from historical fiction, and I eagerly recommend The Dolphin Crossing to anyone who wants to learn more about the early days of World War II in England, and what happened at Dunkirk. It's also, pure and simple, a really good book. Enough characterization for those of us who like that, and enough nail biting adventure for those that like that. It is short enough so as not to be daunting, but packs a punch. I think, however, that the ending stinks and that authors who do this to their readers are not nice.

spoiler, and some talk in general of what I look for in an ending, moving on to the Tooth Fairy.

At the end, John and Pat have had to go back to England because they are running out of gas. They make it home safely, although John has been hit by gunfire, and unload their boat load of soldiers into John's kitchen. And then, after a few days in bed recovering, John learns that Pat refueled the Dolphin and took her back to France, and hasn't shown up again. And that's it. Argh. I would rather know for a fact he was dead, than have it hinted at by the author, who knows I will never find out. Imagining your own endings is not the same as having them told you by the One who Knows. When I try to imagine Pat alive somewhere down the coast, having by some miracle brought the Dolphin back safely, or perhaps picked up by another boat after he sinks the Dolphin, I feel like a kid trying to believe in the tooth fairy. This is one reason I like Tolkien, who went to great pains to make sure we know what happened to everyone at the end of The Lord of the Rings.

Jill Paton Walsh is, of course, still very much alive and still writing books, but for grownups these days, so I doubt very much that she will ever save poor Pat from his fictional limbo of presumed death.

And speaking of the Tooth Fairy, it is a very good thing that we never tried very hard to get our children to believe in it. My poor little one lost a second tooth last night, in violent and bloody circumstances (it was loose, but not quite ripe, when he received a whap in the face from his older brother). So he was promised that the Tooth Fairy would bring extra money on account of the blood. Sigh. For the second time in his life, the Tooth Fairy completely failed to remember to put anything at all under his pillow.... Bad Tooth Fairy.

The Dolphin Summer might be a bit hard to find here in the US. I am not bothering to link to the US Amazon page because it says that it is a book for babies with no copies available. However, if your library, like mine, still has its books from the 1960s (which I think is a good thing) you might be in luck (anyone in Rhode Island can get it through interlibrary loan!). There are, however, many cheap used copies available in paperback in Britain, here at Amazon UK you can buy it for two cents (plus postage).

Other Dunkirk Books:

Another excellent book about an evacuee (a teenaged girl, this time) who heads off to Dunkirk is In Spite of All Terror by Hester Burton. There is also Paul Gallico's lovely and tear-inducing The Snow Goose. And if anyone happens to have a spare copy of Dunkirk Summer, by Philip Turner, which I have never read, I would be happy to take it off your hands! It has been on my Christmas Wants List for years now, and since there are no copies available ever it probably will stay there (right alongside Words and Music, by William Mayne). For more on the unavailability of Dunkirk Summer here's a 2002 article in Collecting Books and Magazines. Of course, anyone who has a spare copy who reads that article will become strangely reluctant to send it off to a stranger...

Here's how the article describes the book:

This is perhaps the best book of the nine. It's the story of a community awakening to the full horrors of the war and of young man and a young woman realising for the first time the full possibilities of their love. For a long time, like Andy Birch, the hero, the reader comes to Darnley Mills as a stranger once more. Then the charm of the familiar places, especially All Saints Church and its rectory, and some of our old favourite characters begins to exert itself. Twenty years later it is the world that will be inherited by David, Peter and Arthur but only if the community survives Hitler and his bombs. No longer a boy, not quite a man, seventeen year old Andy faces up to his future.

Sigh. I want it.

Crystal of Discord, my very own fantasy novel (kind of)

Here it is! I randomly generated it as best I could...I am a bit disappointed with my cover art, which has nothing crystalline about it at all. Nor was it easy to find a place to put the title. Poor planning, if you ask me.


Want to create your own Fantasy Epic? Head over here, to 100 Scope Notes, to see how, and to admire other people's books...

Guest, by Rabindranath Tagore, for Poetry Friday

Guest, by Rabindranath Tagore

Lady, you have filled these exile days of mine
With sweetness, made a foreign traveler your own
As easily as these unfamiliar stars, quietly,
Coolly smiling from heaven, have likewise given me
Welcome. When I stood at this window and stared
At the southern sky, a message seemed to slide
Into my soul from the harmony of the stars,
A solemn music that said, "We know you are ours-
Guest of our light from the day you passed
From darkness into the world, always our guest."

Lady, your kindness is a star, the same solemn tune
In your glance seems to say, "I know you are mine."
I do not know your language, but I hear your melody:
"Poet, guest of my love, my guest eternally."

From Selected Poems, Translated by William Radice (Penguin Classics, 2005)

I haven't been a Poetry Friday contributor for a while, but this poem seemed to me so lovely a place to dream of, like a good book, that I couldn't resist.

(But here is the dark truth behind my choice of this lovely poem-- I have placed myself in the hands of the poetry gods. Every Friday I have been typing "random poem" into google and this is the first one I have fallen for....)

The Poetry Friday roundup this week is at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Blackbringer, by Laini Taylor

Faeries of Dreamdark: Blackbringer, by Laini Taylor (Putnam, 2007, 437 pp)

Way back in 2007, I noticed that a lot of people were saying, with great conviction, that Blackbringer was a very good book indeed (see below for specifics). But I was doubtful. There was this fairy-type person on the cover... Even though she looked fierce, and not twee at all, I was cynically unsure about the book.

Fast forward to fall, 2008. There I was on a Cybils panel with Laini, and while emailing and chatting and reading her blog, I came to realize that someone as smart and fun as she is would easily have been capable of writing as good a book as people said she did. Of course, by the time that realization came, I had a reading list of 160ish books on my hands, so Blackbringer had to wait.

Fast forward to yesterday. I finished Blackbringer, excitedly rushing toward the end, while regretting that the end was nigh. I loved it.

Just in case there is anyone reading this who hasn't read any of the many glowing reviews out there already, Blackbringer tells of an ancient evil being, released from his prison through human folly. Standing against him is a young fairy, Magpie Windwitch, and a group of rambunctiously stalwart crows. Magpie is a great heroine, smart and sassy and caring and interested in life. Sure, she has Wondrous Gifts and a Special Destiny, but these are mere accessories to the vivid person that she is. The crows are funny, teetering on the edge of farce but holding their own on this side of it. The ancient evil is an archetypal mythical awfulness, who manages to avoid being a cliche. And there are a host of other characters, filling out the story beautifully and making this world real.

I'm pretty sure Laini enjoyed tremendously the creation of her world and its people, because this the result is one of the most three-dimensional, lived-in, and cared about places I've been for ages. I felt small, Magpie-sized, while reading it, but I don't remember being told to feel this way. I'm so very glad I didn't read it back in 2007 because now I have a lot less time to wait before the sequel, Silksinger, comes out this fall! (edited to add: here's what I thought about Silksinger)

Because of knowing and liking the author, I was determined to read the book Critically, not allowing emotion to sway intellect. And indeed, there was one word that I thought might have been ill-chosen. That word is "pink." It can be found on page 115.

Blackbringer comes out in paperback (shown below) this May! It's interesting that they are now calling the series just Dreamdark, instead of Fairies of...Since I'm still a fairy sceptic, even though I loved Magpie, I find it more appealing!


There have been tons of blog reviews of Blackbringer; Laini has a comprehensive list at her place. The first I read was at Fuse #8, the most recent was from another of our Cybils panel, Em. I think Em and I would both have shortlisted Laini's book in a second! What were the 2007 people thinking????

And finally, here's a link to Shannon Hale and Laini talking to each other.

(nb: I have labeled this middle grade and YA, not because there is anything edgy, but because this is one that YA people would like too. If I had "adult" as a labeling choice, I'd add that too).

A home decorating idea for those who feel that they don't have enough books...

This (the book part, not the cat and the stair railing) is wallpaper. Perfect for all those parts of your house (the ceiling? The sloping walls of the upstairs bedrooms?) where it is impossible to put actual books.

And now the People of Ireland have also spoken...

Well, actually a panel of judges for Children's Books Ireland spoke. And they announced the shortlist for the Bistro Children's Book of the Year (as I learned over at Kid's Lit). I'm especially pleased that one of our Cybils shortlisted books made the cut--Airman, by Eoin Colfer, which is a lovely adventure story that I really do mean to review some day, and I did, after all, like it enough to help shortlist it myself. Incidentally, this is the only fantasy book on the list...Creature of the Night, by Kate Thompson, sounds like gritty urban fantasy but isn't.

The Children of Britain have spoken: the WHSmith Children's book of the year shortlist!

So over in the UK these two people named Richard and Judy, who seem to make their living (in part) by telling the Plain People of Britain what to read, picked their twenty favorite children's books. They then asked the Children of Britain to vote on their favorites, resulting in----

The WHSmith Children's Book of the Year Short List:

Dinosaurs Love Underpants by Claire Freedman, illus Ben Cort (Simon & Schuster)
Horrid Henry Robs the Bank by Francesca Simon (Orion Children's Books)
Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People by Dav Pilkey (Scholastic)
Artemis Fowl & the Time Paradox by Eoin Colfer (Puffin)
The Tales of Beedle the Bard by J.K. Rowling (Bloomsbury)
Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer (Atom)

Well. I guess this is what happens when you let the children vote. I like Captain Underpants just as much as the next mother, but jeez. (I wanted to see what I would have voted for, so I looked on line for the list of the twenty books they started with, but with no luck). It is rather interesting, in an unsurprising way, that the majority are fantasy. I also wonder if this is the first short list ever in the whole history of book awards to include two books with "underpants" in their titles.

But only one of these books will be the final winner! If you are a child (it seems to be open to "all children") here is where you can go to vote for your favorite from this list, by the 27th of March.

I do not know which book I would vote for. Maybe because I've only read two of them.

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...