Guest Post--Daniel A. Rabuzzi (The Choir Boats and its sequel, The Indigo Pheasant) on writing historical fantasy

For a number of years, The Choir Boats, by Daniel Rabuzzi (Longing for Yount, Book 1, ChiZine Publications, 2009) sat on my wish list.   So when I was asked if I'd be interested in participating in a blog tour to welcome the second book, The Indigo Pheasant (released this October),  I said, yes please, I want to read them both!

Yount is a place that exists uneasily in the same space as our own world, thrust into a strange convergence with Earth through a great convulsion long ago.   And now Yount and its people are imprisoned in their liminal enclave...waiting for the right person to use the key that will unlock the final door that will free them.   Emissaries from Yount have ventured to England, to find the destined person to whom they will give this key, and their choice is a surprising one--a prosperous merchant, Barnabas McDoon.  They promise him that if he takes the key to Yount (a voyage across the southern ocean, where science and mysticism must combine to make the crossing happen), he will find his heart's desire--his lost love.  But Barnabas hesitates...

Then the jailer of Yount, the mysterious and scary Cretched Man, kidnaps Barnabas' nephew, Tom, promising to take him to Yount and there exchange him for the key.  So Barnabas, his business partner, and Sally, Tom's teenaged sister, set fourth on the ship that will take them to Yount...  And Tom is making his own way there (under compulsion), listening to the Cretched Man tell him the other side of the story that Sally is hearing.  If the door were to be unlocked, and Yount were to be freed before the time was ripe, Hell would be unleashed on both Yount and Earth.

Sally begins to dream...of places in Yount she has never seen, of a broken temple at the heart of the island.  Her ship is lost in a  surreal and horrible sea that is no place on Earth, but a song comes to her from her dreams that opens the way.  Back in London, a black girl named Maggie, daughter of a slave who escaped from America, hears Sally, and joins her in song across the miles...and together, they might save both Yount and Earth.  (It's important, and very pleasing to me as a reader, that both these girls are avid readers who are brilliant at math).

So that's the gist of the story of The Choir Boats.  It is a book to savor, with appeal for both adults and younger readers.  At first the story seems simple, the characters pleasant, almost gently risible, the setting familiar.  But gradually more and more complexity appears, more dark notes are sounded, more questions are raised...the dissonance and the magic grows, and the resolution becomes more uncertain.  And so I was eager to plunge into the second book of the series, to see how everything worked out!

I haven't finished The Indigo Pheasant, so I'll be writing a more comprehensive review of both books on Saturday.  But in the meantime, it is my great pleasure to welcome Daniel Rabuzzi to my blog, to talk about historical fantasy!

Daniel studied folklore and mythology in college and graduate school, and earned his doctorate in 18th-century history, so he is a writer who knows his stuff (and it shows!).  His wife is the artist Deborah A. Mills (who illustrated and provided cover art for both Daniel's novels).

And now, the Guest Post:

I write historical fantasies: for me, getting the history right is harder than making the fantastical believable.  After all, we know how giants speak and witches behave, right?   But we most likely do not know how in, say the England of 1815, a vicar speaks or a merchant’s daughter behaves.  Such things have changed in the intervening two centuries, and they will be doubly estranged for readers who are not English. 

So my first task as the author is to immerse myself in that vanished time and place, as foreign to me as Faerie, and bring back enough material to guide both story and reader.  As I have written recently elsewhere (see “A Picture-Show in theNight-Kitchen,” in Layers of Thought, September 26, 2012), I am an “imagist,” not a “plotter.”  My novels spring from scattered images, sounds and words that bake up in the middle of the night.   For The Choir Boats and The Indigo Pheasant, where the action starts in London in 1812, I found myself haunted by visions of tall-case clocks with ornate hands and the moon chasing the sun on the face, of winsome portraits revealed within a delicate locket, of carriages grinding over cobblestones, of bold patterns on porcelain tea cups, and equally vibrant patterns on colorful waistcoats.   

These artifacts, which I spend many hours looking at in museums and in books, literally set the scene.  My wife and artistic partner, Deborah Mills, has rendered many into the illustrations for The Choir Boats and The Indigo Pheasant.  Some of her illustrations are interspersed here, side by side with the originals that inspired them.*

And then my actors start to drift in, one by one, sometimes in groups.  So like us, and yet so different.

Their language, for starters, is not wholly ours.  Not that the words are different, not for the most part, though certainly some of their words have disappeared for us, and many of our words cannot be known to them.  No, it is more that they use our common vocabulary with a different sensibility (now there is a proper Regency word to be sure!), with small but important distinctions from our usage.  For instance, “artificial” and “condescending” had a more positive import for Regency ears than they do for ours, while “enthusiasm” for them was a negative, as it had a different definition then.

Individual words can be deceptive enough...the deeper challenge is diction, style and syntax.  Well-educated Britons of that era constructed sentences in a very different manner from ours today, among other things, they attempted to emulate the models of rhetoric inherited from Classical Greece and Rome, and they were conversant with the King James Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost.  (Modern Americans may feel more at home with the vivid similes and brash banter recorded among the less-educated Britons of that time!).  We understand their meaning but simply don’t talk like that today.

Hence the problem: creating dialogue that rings true to the period without bogging down the modern-day reader.  Frankly, the challenge is nearly impossible to overcome, so I have in my novels opted for a transparently extravagant approach, i.e., the dialogue is intended to call attention to itself, as if it were the chanted spell that transports the reader back to the earlier time.  Call it an open trickery on the surface of the hidden trickery that is the writing of fiction.

 I am very interested to hear what readers of Charlotte’s Library have to say about the challenges, and satisfactions, of historical fiction generally, and historical fantasy specifically.  Regency clocks ticked seconds as ours do...but we can never be entirely sure how those seconds sounded in the ears of Regency people.

*the image of Sally's locket (the central one) and the Pheasant Clock are reproduced here with all rights reserved, (c) Deborah A. Mills.  The copyright to the bottom locket picture is held by ßlϋeωãve, and the original can be found here.


Thank you so much, Daniel, and Deborah! I'll be picking up the threads of the conversation on Saturday, when I write my full review, but in the meantime, those who wish to say something viz historical fiction here, please do so!

More information can be found at these places:

Book Previews:

The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/media/choir-boats/TheChoirBoats-Preview.pdf

The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/media/indigo/indigo_preview.pdf

Book page links: 

The Choir Boats: http://chizinepub.com/books/choir-boats.php

The Indigo Pheasant: http://chizinepub.com/books/indigo-pheasant.php

Daniel's web site: www.danielarabuzzi.com

Daniel at Facebook:   http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Choir-Boats/67307451458

Daniel's Twitter: @TheChoirBoats

Deborah's web site: http://www.deborahmillswoodcarving.com/

And here are the other stops on The Indigo Pheasant's Blog Tour:

Sept 11 - Small Beer Press/Not a Journal

Sept 14 - Civilian Reader

Sept 17 - Fantasy Book Critic

Sept 18 - Bibliophile Stalker

Sept 24 - That Artsy Reader Girl

Sept 26 - Layers of Thought   Book & Yount greeting cards giveaway.

Sept 27 - Dark Wolf's Fantasy Reviews

Sept 28 - So Many Precious Books, So Little Time   Book giveaway.

Oct 3     - Bull Spec's new Wednesday feature "The Hardest Part"

Oct 4 -     Charlotte's Library

Oct 4 -     World in a Satin Bag

Oct 5 -     The Cozy Reader

Oct 11 -   Jess Resides Here

TBS -      Disquieting Visions

TBS  -     Grasping for the Wind

Waiting on Wednesday--Earth and Air, by Peter Dickinson

So a long time ago, Robin McKinley and Peter Dickinson, who are married, decided it would be a nice thing to create four books of short stories together, one book for each of the elements.  Water came out, and Fire came out....and Robin McKinley found that her short stories had a tendency to want to become novels.  Three such novels later, the stories Peter Dickinson had written for his contribution to Earth and Air were languishing....until now.

Perusing the program notes for Kidlitcon, I saw an advertisement from Small Beer Press announcing forthcoming books, and, being very fond of Small Beer Press because of their Joan Aiken book, The Serial Garden, I stopped perusing to actually read all the details.  And there was the announcement for Earth and Air--Peter Dickinson's stories gathered in one volume, coming out this month.


I must confess that I bought Water and Fire because of being a McKinley fan, but I was very impressed by Dickinson's stories in those volumes, impressed enough to both make a happy "Oh" sound, and to do Earth and Air the penultimate compliment (?) of placing it in my Amazon cart (the ultimate compliment being to stand outside the bookstore on release day) with the expectation of either buying it for myself in the near future, or asking for it for Christmas.

From the publisher's website:

"In this collection, you will find stories that range from the mythic to contemporary fantasy to science fiction. You will find a troll, gryphons, a beloved dog, the Land of the Dead, an owl, a minotaur, and a very alien Cat. Earth and Air is the third and final book in a trilogy of shared collections connected by the four classical elements. It follows previous volumes Water: Tales of Elemental Spirits and Fire: Tales of Elemental Spirits, written by both Peter Dickinson and Robin McKinley.
Ridiki is Steff’s beloved dog, named after Eurydice, whom the poet Orpheus tried to bring back from the dead. When, like her namesake, Ridiki is bitten by a snake and dies, Steff decides that he too should journey to the Underworld to ask the King of the Land of the Dead for his dog back.
Mari is the seventh child of a family in which troll blood still runs. When her husband goes missing in a Scottish loch, she must draw upon the power of her blood to rescue him. Sophie, a young girl, fashions a witch’s broomstick out of an ash sapling, and gets more than she bargained for. An escaped slave, Varro, must kill a gryphon, in order to survive. A boy named Yanni allies himself with an owl and a goddess in order to fight an ancient evil. A group of mind-bonded space travelers must face an unknown threat and solve the murder of a companion before time runs out."

So anyway, thanks again Small Beer Press for The Serial Garden, thanks for your support of Kidlitcon, and thanks for publishing this one!

Waiting on Wednesday is a meme hosted by Jill at Breaking the Spine

My son is being forced to read banned books

It's Banned Books Week, and it has occurred to me that all the books that my son is reading for 7th grade English class have shown up on lists of banned or challenged books.

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros, can actually still be taught in high schools in Arizona, having survived the debacle that occurred when the Dept. of Education went into classrooms and removed the books used for Mexican Studies.  But it wasn't clear at first, when it showed up on the list of books being challenged and removed, if it was going to be approved by those in power or not.

The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton, is "ranked #43 on the American Library Association’s Top 100 Most Challenged Books of 1990-2000 and has been banned from some schools and libraries because of its portrayal of gang violence, underage smoking and drinking, strong language, slang usage, and exposé on family dysfunction." (from Banned Books Awareness).  My son just finished this one, and is not smoking, drinking, or swearing (much), nor is he more a dysfunctional member of the family than he was before.

Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, has been denounced by the religious leaders of Iran and banned in that country.

To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee, is going to expose my son to the "n" word 48 times.   But I think he's going to be a better person for having read it.

Macbeth is going to expose him to graphic violence and witchcraft.  Shoot.  He took part in a production of it last year, so it's too late.

In short, I'm glad my son is going to this school.  They have lots of banned books in their library too.

The Many-Colored Land, by Julian May

For Timeslip Tuesday today, I have an old favorite--The Many-Colored Land, by Julian May (1981).   The cover at left is the cover I have.  All other covers are wrong.  This one is so much a favorite that I am on my second copy, having read the first to death; I think my mother might be on her second copy as well, which just goes to show. Even my husband enjoyed it [edited to add: the even is because he has very high standards]. It was marketed to adults, but I think it has lots of teen appeal (I was a teen when I first read it), and as well as being a darn good story, there's a generous sprinkling of paranormal romances (lots of people get to have romances.  Some happy, some less so).

So.  Imagine that in the future, various alien races with psionic powers have made contact with Earth, Earth having reached a critical mass of psionic inhabitants of its own.  Earth is now part of a galactic milieu of calm order; more and more humans are being born with mental gifts, war is over, all is happy.   Except that there are some people who still aren't--the deviants, mystics, misfits, eccentrics, criminals, those whose souls are out of step somehow with a galaxy of good feeling.

Then imagine that a French professor invented a machine that allows one way travel back to the Pliocene (six million or so years ago).   He dismissed it as worthless, and his widow was just about to dismantle it, when the first would-be time traveller begged to pass through, wanting the chance to explore an unpeopled world.   And more and more travellers came...some willing travellers, some pushed back in time because they were too troublesome to be allowed to stay.

Time travel becomes organized; the travellers equipping themselves with what they need for life they'll imagine they'll have (I love reading all the lists of what people are taking back to the past!).   They are sent back in groups, after a brief period of bonding.  One such group (our main characters in this first book--men and women, old and young) is about to pass through....a group whose members are going to change the past, and in so doing, make the future what it's going to be.

It's not a walk in the park, back in the Pliocene. There are surprises (you know that paranormal romance thing?  that's a hint).  What the time travellers find will blow their minds (some to the point of insanity).  And the reader (if the reader is at all like me) will be riveted. 

I don't generally like books with multiple main characters, and story lines of great complexity and fantastical-ness going of hither and thither.  My first time through, lo these many years ago, I might have found myself uncertain during the introductory period--there are a lot of characters, and we meet them all individually, and there's a lot to keep track of.  But May makes it all work in a masterpiece of plotting and characterization and exuberant imagination.    For those who like the mental powers and the paranormal, there's that.  For those that like the survival in a strange land, there's that.  For those that like their characters put through various emotional ringers, and/or their characters finding love and friendship, there's that too.  Magic. Sex. Death. Flying on the wings of the mind.  Extinct mammals (so few fantasy books do as nice a job with extinct mammals).  Crafting of beautiful things.  Generous splashes of humor.  Tragedy.

In short, I really cannot recommend this too highly to anyone who wants a sci fi/fantasy adventure of epic proportions, set on a very different earth.    But I've read it so many times I can't be dispassionate about it...this first book, and the three that follow it, are and integral and much loved  part of my mental map.   However, since my mother and my husband, both of whom are less emotional thinkers than me, and both of whom read grown-up books, enjoyed the series as well, I feel pretty confident in my recommending.

(I also don't feel like writing a thoughtful review, because that would be full of spoilers.  I hope I haven't spoiled it too much as it is!)

My Friday afternoon at Harper Collins

Yesterday I wrote about the publisher preview I attended at Random House as part of Kidlitcon; today I tell of my afternoon at Harper Collins!  Once again there were tasty snacks, and once again the editors took the time from their busy lives bringing books into the world to tell us bloggers about them.  Thank you!

The Harper Collins folks talked about their 2013 titles, which include many books that gladdened my middle grade sci fi/fantasy loving heart.

First and foremost of the books I'm looking forward to is Fyre, by Angie Sage (April 2013), the seventh and final Septimus Heap book.    I love this series, with all its intricate details of place and plot, and its lovable cast of characters, and apparently Fyre is a stunner.

But lots of other books sound excellent as well.  I'm just going to talk about the fantasy/sci fi ones that appealed to me in particular...starting with one that I promise will fly off the shelves into the hands of your average 7-9 year old--Stick Dog, by Tom Watson (January 8).  This is the epic quest of four dogs, drawn stick style, in search of a...hamburger.  It just exudes kid appeal.  I handed it to my nephew on Friday evening--he read it cover to cover.  I handed it to my own nine year old on Sunday--he read it cover to cover, chuckling. 

There a new series for that same elementary school aged kids that I wasn't sure at first was for me--The Fairy Bell Sisters, by Margaret McNamara, about Tinkerbell's siblings.   It's for readers 7-9, and the covers reflect this.  But when I heard it described as "Little Women with wings," how could I not be interested?

Moving middle grade-ward:

There's a "kids moving into a mysterious house that leads them into a fantasy adventure" book (I like these)-- House of Secrets by Chris Columbus and Ned Vizzini (April 2013).  

Superheros are big these days--Sidekicked, by John David Anderson (June 2013) sounds like a good addition to this subgenre.  For young fans of mythical creatures, The Menagerie, by Tui T. Sutherland and Kari H. Sutherland (March 12) looks like a winner.  And in January from Walden comes The Fellowship for Alien Detection, by Kevin Emerson, coming Feb. 2013, and here is where I fail Utterly and Completely as a reporter of previews, because I put a really emphatic checkmark next to its picture on my handout, but didn't actually write down details.  However, I'm sure I can trust myself to look forward to it...(I'll try to find it closer to the date and do a Waiting on Wednesday post on it).

The School for Good and Evil, by Soman Chainani, got even more than an emphatic checkmark--my notes show a star taking up the entire lined space next to it.  The Harper Collins folks were very excited about this one.  It's "the tale of two girls, one fair and beloved, the other homely and reviled, who are kidnapped from their village by a charismatic storyteller who runs the legendary School for Good and Evil, where students prepare to become future fairy tale heroes and villains."

The new Seven Wonders series by Peter Lerangis sounds like one to give your basic Percy Jackson fan; I'm looking forward to the first book, The Colossus Rises  (February 5).   And one to give to your geeky young sci fi reader--Case File 13: Zombie Kid, by J. Scott Savage (December).    Speaking of sci fi, the authors of The Familiars series, Adam Jay Epstein and Adam Jacobson, have a new series (about kids marooned in space with alien convicts!) coming out this summer--book 1 is Starbounders.

The editor of Jinx, by Sage Blackwood (January 8) sold me on that one by saying it was reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones, and I am looking forward lots to Merrie Haskell's new book, Handbook for Dragon Slayers, coming in May--a historical fantasy with strong girl character that sounds excellent (the cover hasn't been officially revealed yet.  But I bet it makes you all want the book too!)


Moving on to YA:  

The Madman's Daughter, by Megan Shepherd, (coming January 29) was one included in our gift bag of ARCs, which elicited a very pleased ooohhh from me--the titular madman is none other than Dr.  Moreau, as in "Island of..." 

And how could any reader of YA fantasy not look forward to City of A Thousand Dolls, by Miriam Forster (Feb. 5)--"Nisha was abandoned at the gates of the City of a Thousand Dolls when she was just a child. Now sixteen, she lives on the grounds of the isolated estate, where orphan girls apprentice as musicians, healers, courtesans, and, if the rumors are true, assassins."   

Or how about this one, pitched as "The Korean Blue Sword, with martial arts."   That would be Prophecy, by Ellen Oh (January 2).

Or "Rapunzel in the Catskills" aka Towering, by Alex Flinn (May), or "Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children meets The Shining" aka Asylum, by Madeline Roux (April).

But the book preview that impressed my impressionable mind most of all isn't a middle grade or YA fantasy.  It is: 

Stardines Swim High Across the Sky, a book of poems by Jack Prelutsky (Feb. 26).

I find myself murmuring "stardines" at odd intervals, and getting great satisfaction from it.

So thank you very much, Harper Collins, for a. publishing books I want to read b. being so generous with your time and ARCs!  (and the non sci fi/fantasy MG and YA ARCs that you gave me I put on the book swap trolley at kidlitcon and they found good homes with people who were, I assume, as excited to have them as I was to have the sci fi/fantasy ones!)

My Friday morning at Random House

One of the lovely treats of Kidlitcon 2012 was the Friday publisher previews.  The major publishing houses of New York opened their doors to groups of bloggers, and the editors themselves gave us lovely previews of their forthcoming books.  Thanks so much, Publishers, for doing this, and thanks so much, Monica, for organizing it!

My Friday morning publisher was Random House.  I arrived early, but was happy to spend time perusing hundreds of titles from years past on display, and musing about how much money they would sell for on ebay should R.H. become desperate (I look at my own books and muse about the same thing, quite often, so I'm not actually worried that R.H. is going to need to do this).  Seriously, it was rather awe inspiring to see all the books they'd published that I recognized...

Moving on up the building, us bloggers were welcomed with tasty breakfast snacks, and I found myself in conversation with Jim Thomas, editor of Seraphina.  It was lovely to see his pride in all the stars its gotten (seven, which is remarkable for a debut book), and fascinating to hear of the struggle for its US cover (certain more commercial interests wanted something less black and white and more (this is my conjecture) along the lines of a girl in a beautiful dress of inappropriateness passionately embracing a dragon while the wind blows her long (probably) red hair into tangles).    (You can read more about how Seraphina came to be published here at Random Acts of Reading).   So anyway, that was very interesting indeed, and then we all sat down to hear about this fall's books!

The presentations kicked off with apps and enhanced books and picture books.  One in particular looks like its going to be a classic for the ages--  I have a Dream, in which the more kid friendly elements of Martin Luther King, Jr. are illustrated by Kadir Nelson (and now I am wondering if anyone has nominated it for the Cybils yet...it really was lovely....goes to check...and lo!  Now I have my picture book non-fiction nomination).

We then moved on to the Magic Tree House books, which are now twenty years old!  R. H. is doing special full color editions of the first four (they are very attractive), and the author and illustrator both got a chance to go back in and fix small details and inconsistencies that had been bugging them all these years.  Cool.

A new Squish book just came out--Captain Disaster!  (Why haven't you gotten it for me, asks my 9 year old, reading over my shoulder.  I need to fix that.)  Squish is a great graphic novel series for the seven to nine year old set.  I promise.  (There's a new Lunch Lady book too--Lunch Lady and the Picture Day Peril).

But the graphic novel I'm most excited for is The City of Ember, in full color!

There are several companion books/sequels just out, or coming soon, that gladden my middle grade loving heart, but I'll be reviewing them later, d.v., so I'll just move quickly on to some YA!  (which is ironic, in that people reading my blog do so for the mgsff...).  So I'll just quickly mention Joshua Dread, the start of a superhero/supervillain series that looks like fun...

Like The Paladin Prophecy.  Mysterious boarding school ftw!  The final book of Montmaray--The FitzOsbornes at War! (coming Oct. 9).   I want even more now to read Unspoken, by Sarah Rees Brennan...

And there were more, but I have to go now.  In any event, I came home with a generous Magic Tree House bag of books,  one of which, The Blood Keeper, diverted me very nicely indeed on the bus ride home.....

THANK YOU so much, editors and publicists for Random House, for taking the time to share your books with us!  And for the tasty snacks.

(now having done the easy part, I'm going try to add illustrations in the new blogger!  Oh joy).

What will you nominate for the Cybils?

We can all go nominate books for the Cybils starting at midnight, PST, which means that when I wake up and rush to the computer at c. 5:30 EST (rushing carefully, so as not to spill my coffee), I will get to see hundreds of people's favorite books.  Yes, there are people who are on their own computers right at the stroke of midnight, nominating away...

Two Notes:

Note:  you can nominate one book for each of the disperate categories.  Any book published in the US and/or Canada, from October 16, 2011 to October 15, 2012 is eligible.  This is always a little scary for the books published in these first two weeks of October--fewer people, of course, have read these and fallen hard for them.  However, the Cybils organizers, with great sagesse, have changed the rules so that the publishers can fill in at least some of the blanks, so it will not be quite as tense this year as in years past.

Note 2:  The Cybils panelists look for two things in the books under consideration: quality writing of a knock the readers' socks off variety, and young reader appeal of the sort that reduces a pristine book to a tattered mass of pulp because it's been passed from hand to hand so often.   The winners won't necessarily be the same books that one might chose if one were awarding the prizes to "children's books with tremendous appeal to adult readers."

End of Notes.

So anyone can nominate one book per category.  Or just one book, in one category.  These nominations from the floor (from readers, bloggers, parents, publishers, authors--in short, anyone in the whole world who loves children's and YA books) shine lovey bits of light on the dear books you feel should be loved more, and this is good. 

However, it's also a chance to nominate the books that are being loved plenty.  Zita.  Seraphina.  The Fault in Our Stars.  Code Name Verity.

And this is where all those people nominating at the stroke of midnight have an advantage.  A book can only be nominated once.   So if you want your name up on the Cybils website in glowing lights as The One Who Picked the Winner in a specific category, and if the books you have in mind fall into the much-loved category, you might want to plan accordingly. 

I myself have planned not to get up at four in the morning (I did it for Charles and Diana when I was a kid, and that was plenty).   So, just for the record, here are the books I'll nominate if they aren't taken already in the really, really small number of categories of genres I read:

Younger graphic novels:  I love Zita, and Legends of Zita is just as good as her first book.  But I'm giving my nod to Giants Beware! (my review) which tickled me tremendously.

YA Sci Fi/fantasy:  I really liked Vodnick, by Bryce Moore (my review)

YA:  The Fault in Our Stars.   Out of the six straight YA books I've read this year, this was my favorite....

And I'm waiting and seeing on the MG SFF, because of being a panelist in that category.

(and so now I leave this post, feeling a little sad that I've read so few picture books and children's non-fiction books....what was I thinking??????  Of course the Cybils Short Lists, coming earlier January, will tell me which ones I must go back and find.  But in the meantime I just might head over to the bookstore and try to quickly fall in love before the nomination period ends....)

This Sunday's round-up of middle grade fantasy and sci fi from around the blogs (9/30/12)

I'm on my way back from Kidlitcon today...with 26 middle grade fantasy and science books to read!   Later this week I'll do a recap post of the two publisher previews I went to on Friday, from whence about twenty of these books came (the others came from the ARC swap trolley on Saturday).  But in any event, Kidlitcon was as fun as ever, and every year there are more lovely people who I know who I'm so happy to see again, and every year I make new friends.  It is good. 

So here's this week's roundup of what I found in my blog reading viz middle grade sci fi/fantasy.  Please let me know if I missed your post! (it somewhat more likely than usual that I did because of being at Kidlitcon)

First, an news item:  Nominations for the Cybils open tomorrow, Oct. 1.  At midnight, Pacific Time.  Go forth and nominate!

Second:  the reviews this week are slightly more diverse (ie they have characters who aren't white and they are written by authors of color) than usual.  This is entirely due to this blog event--A More Diverse Universe-- which I hope we see again! (It was a week long carnival gathering reviews of speculative fiction by authors of color, so there are lots of books for older readers too!)

The Reviews:
 
3 Below, by Patrick Carmen, at Good Books and Good Wine

Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor, at Jenny's Books and Starmetal Oak Reviews

Ante's Inferno, by Griselda Heppel, at Fantastic Reads

Ash Mistry and the Savage Fortress, by Sarwat Chadda, at BookLust and The Novel Life

The Atomic Weight of Secrets, by Eden Unger Bowditch, at Charlotte's Library 

The Cavendish Home for Boys and Girls, by Claire Legrand, at The Adventures of Cecelia Bedelia

Claws, by Mike Grinti and Rachel Grinti, at Small Review 

Dust Girl, by Sarah Zettel, at library_mama and Oops...Wrong Cookie

Emily Knight I AM, by at A. Bello, at The Children's Book Review

The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Lead the Revels There, by Catherynne M. Valente, at Karissa's Reading Review

The Golden Door, by Emily Rodda, at Charlotte's Library

Haroun and the Sea of Stories, by Salman Rushdie, at Reading on a Rainy Day and Iris on Books

The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom, by Christopher Healy, at Semicolon and  library_mama

The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate, by Scott Nash, at Ms. Yingling Reads 

The Hunt of the Unicorn, by C.C. Humphreys, at Book Sake

Justice and Her Brothers, by Virginia Hamilton, at Charlotte's Library

Keeper of the Lost Cities, by Shannon Messegner, at The Book Cellar

Knight's Castle, by Edward Eager, at Tor

Look Ahead, Look Back, by Annette Laing, at Charlotte's Library

Mutiny in Time, by James Dashner, at Ms. Yingling Reads

Professor Gargoyle (Tales from Lovecraft Middle School, 1) by Charles Gilman, at The Elliott Review and The Reading Date

The Robe of Skulls, by Vivian French, at Wandering Librarians

Rosemary in Paris (The Hourglass Adventures), by Barbara Robertson, at Time Travel Times Two 

The Sea of Monstors, by Rick Riordan, at My Precious

The Second Spy, by Jacqueline Wilson, at Michelle Mason

The Serpent's Shadow, by Rick Riordan, at Biblio File

The Spy Princess, by Sherwood Smith, at Sonderbooks

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin, at I Make Up Words 

Authors and Interviews

A.J. Hartley (Darwen Arkwright and the Peregrine Pact) at A Thousand Wrongs (giveaway)

Shannon Messenger (Keeper of the Lost Cities) talks about books she loved as a kid at Project Mayhem

Other Good Stuff:

All Hallow's Read approaches.  Neil Gaiman explains it.

There's a fiftieth anniversary celebration of The Wolves of Whilloughby Chase, by Joan Aiken, coming up in NY toward the end of October.

And finally, haven't we all wished, at one time or another, that we had an inflatable unicorn horn to tie onto our cat?

Now we can live that dream.

If I want to make my 12 year old son shriek, all I have to do is say, in a cloyingly sweet voice, "rainbow unicorn kittens."  So when I saw this, I thought of him...(thanks to Tor).

The Diviners, by Libba Bray (with a bit of Kidlitcon to start with)

I am writing from New York, where I am busily attending Kidlitcon.  Yesterday I attended two lovely publisher previews, at Random House and Harper Collins, where us bloggers heard about many wonderful sounding books (about which more later), enjoyed tasty snacks, and left with generous bags of books.  It was then banquet time, where very good company (I sat with Kelly from Stacked and Leila from Bookshelves of Doom, neither of whom I'd met before today), and more tasty food combined to make a very pleasant evening. 

The particular upshot of all this is that, due to the generous bags of books, there is no way I want to take my ARC of the Diviners, which kept me company on my journey, back home with me.  So I am quickly sharing my thoughts.

The Diviners, by Libba Bray (Little Brown, YA, Sept 18, 2012) --paranormal historical fiction in which the excitement of life as as party girl in  New York in the Roaring Twenties turns into the excitement of trying to stop a murderers, would-be Antichrist!

The Basic Plot:   Evie is a flapper girl, desperate to plunge into life and (this is my opinion) immerse herself in sensory overload so that she doesn't have to think about things she'd rather not thing about (such as her dead brother.  Such as the effects of her actions on other people.  Especially the effects of her preternatural gift--the ability to hold an object, and see things about its owner).   So when her parents send her off to her uncle in New York (curator of a museum of the occult), she's thrilled.

When the first bizarrely grotesque murder victim is discovered, and Evie's uncle is asked by the police for his opinion on the occult elements of the crime, Evie goes along for the ride, excited to see her first New York crime scene.  And finds herself into very dark and dangerous waters...because this is no ordinary murder, and no ordinary police force can stop the inexorable progression of killings.   Killings that might lead to hell on earth....

And in the meantime, the canvas of New York on which the murders are being played out is as full of characters as a Bruegel painting.   All of whom have secrets...

My Thoughts, written in haste because of needing, like Evie, to hurl myself back into the giddy excitement that is Manhattan (although I don't think Evie would be interested in Kidlitcon):

--Evie annoyed me at first, but grew on me.  I decided that I liked having a flawed character front and center--she was very believable, but with room to change as she became more mature.  And she has her good points.
--the first few murders, before the identity of the murder was confirmed, were very interesting indeed.  After Evie and co. figure it out, the next murders are still interesting, but not as much so because we know what's happening.
--there were too many characters of interest with secrets and too many bits of unresolved or apparently extraneous side plot.  I really really did not think it added anything to the book, for instance, for Jericho to have the particular secret that he did.  I'm sure that it will all be useful in future books, but I do think that The Diviners could have been trimmed and tightened.   It was very long (the final version, according to Amazon, is 608 pages) and I don't think it really needed to be that long.

Final Conclusion:  Even the snappy dialogue, interesting characters (even though there were perhaps too many of them, they were all interesting), and a creepy, supernatural mystery weren't quite enough to keep the ball rolling as briskly as I would have liked.  

The Atomic Weight of Secrets, by Eden Unger Bowditch

The Atomic Weight of Secrets,  or The Arrival of the Mysterious Men in Black, by Eden Unger Bowditch (Bancroft Press, March, 2011, middle grade, 339 pages) is the first book of The Young Inventors Guild, a historical sci fi story of five brilliant children.  Their parents were extraordinary too, so much so that one day in 1903, when the mysterious men in black came calling, they had to go.   But the men in black had a plan for the children too, one that involved sending them off to rural Ohio, where they went to their own special boarding school, under the loving care of Miss Brett (the first adult to ever read out loud to them--the brilliant parents were too busy being brilliant to have much time for their kids). 

Twelve-year-old Jasper Modest (a young inventor) and his six-year-old sister, Lucy (gifted with a perfect memory), were taken from London.  Nine-year-old Wallace Banneker, determined to follow in the footsteps of his family of African American scientists, inventors, and mathematicians, was taken from New York.  Twelve-year-old Noah Canto-Sagas, brilliant both mentally and musically, was taken from Toronto.  And the oldest child, the thirteen-year-old Faye Vigyanveta, taken from the luxurious home of her parents, Indian scientists, is fiercely determined to find out the secret of the Mysterious Men in Black who have torn apart their lives for no clear reason.

And they are indeed Mysterious.  "In black," for them, includes black tutus.  Black bear suites.  Black scarfs concealing their faces, which are shrouded by black sombreros, Easter bonnets, and the like.  All manner of grab bag bits of clothing, concealing them utterly.   And they are not exactly forthcoming to the children--which is to say, they don't say anything. 

Although the children's strange school is a virtual prison, and their weekend trips to loving foster mothers carefully orchestrated to make escape impossible, this bizarre situation is one where the children can thrive, becoming each other's first true friends.   All the delicious food they want, adult attention and love, and beautiful lab equipment.

Except that there is no getting around the fact that their parents are missing (and though they might have been distant, un-nurturing parents for the most part, this is still disturbing), the men in black are their jailors, and if they want answers, they are going to have to escape.  And being brilliant young inventors, the answer comes to them--they must build a flying machine...

This is a book that requires from its reader an acceptance of the bizarre.  The children's situation is like a dream, and the reader knows no more about the men in black then they do (although this reader, at least, has read more science fiction than the kids have, back in 1903, and has a theory....what do they actually look like, under all that black concealment???). 

Acceptance is also required regarding the pacing of the book.  We meet all five right at the start of things, just as they are about to try to escape.  But then the author goes back to the start of things, but doesn't introduce us properly to all of the kids at once, instead, doling the introductions out at intervals.  She doesn't rush it--we don't get Wallace Bannaker's back story, the last one, until page 182, which I found extreme.   So it wasn't until the final third of the book that I felt I had a really firm handle on the kids, and could really appreciate their interactions and character arcs.    Likewise, although the book starts with the escape plan getting underway, it then goes back to tell all the story up to that point.

So I read much of the book with a slightly uninvested feeling (though I liked the kids, enjoyed the details of their strange school life, and was curious to learn more about the mystery).  It was not till the story catches up to closer to where the book begins, with the great escape project well underway, that the pieces all clicked for me.   At that point, all the disparate gifts of the kids combine to make things really start humming, the tension grows, and the reader waits with baited breath for the Great Reveal....and realizes she's not going to get it.  Nope, no little wrapping up the plot threads here, just waiting for the next book...

Still, though I have reservations, it never occurred to me to put it down.  And I think it might work well for the right young reader--smart, lonely kids in particular! 

(Thanks to Wallace and Faye, this is one for my list of multicultural sci fi/fantasy, and it's also one for my spec fic school list too!)

Justice and Her Brothers, by Virginia Hamilton

This review is my contribution to the More Diverse Universe blog fest, a week of bloggers highlighting speculative fiction books by and about people of color.

I've chosen to fill in a gap in my own reading, by taking a look at Justice and Her Brothers, by Virginia Hamilton (Greenwillow Books, 1978).

This is a book that's floated around on the edges of my book browsing consciousness for years...but the cover I would have seen in the library as a child (shown here) looks like one of those regular girl growing up and learning life lessons kind of stories, and it didn't appeal.  But I think I may have tried it at one point.  I can imagine having tried it, excepting fantasy or science fiction, (because that's what you find out it is when you read the jacket flap--children with "supersensory powers"), but never making it past the first slow chapters of very realistic hot, sticky summer, and the inescapable fact that there are indeed, as the title suggests, older brothers involved.  I am a sister kind of person myself, and although Rush and Oliver Melendy would be lovely brothers, Justice is not that lucky--her older twin brothers have, um, issues.

So in short, you would never know from the first few chapters, or from the hardback cover,  that one of Justice's twin brothers is a deeply disturbed, bullying megalomaniac psychic who has been systematically oppressing his twin and who is about to start work on Justice.   It takes quite a while to realize, buried as it is in the hot summer of bike riding and snake hunting, that Justice has psychic powers too!  Really powerful ones.  Justice, it turns out, is not having an ordinary summer...instead, she is one of two kids being trained in to use their mental powers by a teacher who erases her memories of each session.

It makes for slightly odd reading.  There one is, with skinned knees and mosquito bites, having an ordinary few pages of deep immersion into the ordinary life of a little sister, and then, like a spouting whale, comes a psychic bit and they come faster and faster until, in the last ten pages, there's a confrontation between Justice and her brother,  but then the three siblings plus Justice's classmate in phsycic home school form a unit of phsycic power bonding destined to do great things in the future because they are the first of a new class of mutant humans (or something) and they kind of travel through time and space to see a future that they are going to have to save.   Her bad brother isn't all that sorry, or willing to cooperate, but he has some magical phsycic healing thing happen, and it's implied that at least he's not going to be a total psychopath anymore.  And so it ends, just as they are all gathered together and ready to adventure.  (I had some issues with the pacing of this book).

And that concludes the summary portion of this post.

It was, as my summary suggests, a mix I found a tad diconcerting.  So though I found it a fascinating, and gripping, read, it wasn't a book that entirely worked for me as a reader.  Justice and her Brothers reads very much as a prologue to future adventures, which, in fact, it is.  In the subsequent books of the series, Dustland (1980), and The Gathering (1981), the science fiction is front and center, and I'm hoping I'll find those more completely satisfying.

Justice and her Brothers is a groundbreaking book.  It is the first English language speculative fiction novel, as far as I know, that was written for children with a black girl as its protagonist.   It's clear from the hardback cover that Justice and her brothers are black kids.  However, Hamilton never makes a point of underlining it; she just drops in small descriptors here and there that do not compare skin color to any sort of food or beverage (as is so often the case in today's books).  Justice's family is an ordinary family, with caring parents, without poverty, racism, the legacy of slavery etc. driving any part of the story.  Instead, what you get is sci fi mixed with realistic fiction, starring a girl who is black.

I wish it had been followed by a slew of other multiculural science ficiton and fantasy books for kids, but the ground that Hamilton broke here was left pretty much unplanted.  Here's an article that Yolanda Hood wrote that addresses this--"Rac(e)ing into the Future: Looking at Race in Recent Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels for Young Adults by Black Authors" (The Alan Review, 36(3), 2009).  (Thanks, Ebony of the Child_Lit List, for the link!)

Secondly, I have a feeling (that doesn't have enough research and thought behind it to count as a real argument) that this is also ground breaking in its combination of a very real, very richly described setting with fantastic elements.  Just as Alan Garner did with Elidor in 1965 (a fantasy in which the grit and rubble of the real world keep the fantasy from becoming an escapist journey to a magical realm), Justice's story in this first book is firmly anchored in her place in real life.   It, too, does not offer a fanciful other world into which young readers can escape.  But again, I don't think that writers of the 1980s, or even the 1990s, took this approach to speculative fiction for kids and ran with it.   It's not until recently that books books like Ingrid Law's Savvy (2008) start turning up that do something similar.  (Please let me know if you think I'm wrong about this!)

Finally, here are more covers for Justice and Her Brothers, some that emphasize the sci fi, and some that don't. (And they are all in an aesthetically unpleasing line on the left and in different sizes cause the new blogger stinks and I don't have a decent photo editing program here at home.  It hurts).

My own favorite is the Leo and Diane Dillon cover--the one with the tree. That version of the book is clearly being marketed as speculative fiction (it has the imprint "Flare Fantasy" on the cover). The snake cover is both icky, deceptive, and disturbing. The desert cover is wrong (they don't go to a desert in this first book). And the Column of Light cover is too far tilted toward science fiction.

A More Diverse Universe blog tour is well underway....

This is the third day of the More Diverse Universe blog fest, celebrating the works of speculative fiction authors of color. The full schedule can be found here at Aarti's blog (she's one of the fabulous organizers), BookLust, and I have already added several new to me books of wonderful sounding-ness to my reading list....

I'll be chiming in tomorrow with the book that I think is the first ever middle grade spec. fic.  novel written in the US that has, as its main character, an African-American girl...

Look Ahead, Look Back (The Snipesville Chronicles #3), by Annette Laing, for Timeslip Tuesday

Look Ahead, Look Back, by Annette Laing (Confusion Press, 2012), is the latest adventure of three time travelling kids from Georgia.  When Hannah and Alex Diaz moved from California to Snipesville, they suffered all kinds of culture shock, but were fortunate to make a new friend, a boy named Brandon.  But Brandon, whose black, doesn't go to the Diaz's snooty private school... However, for these three kids, there is a lot more to life than school.  When they stumble across a skeletal body eroding out of the ground, they find themselves embarking on their most nail-biting time travel adventure to date.  And this time, the mysterious professor who masterminded their previous travels doesn't seem to be on hand to provide her usual safety net.

In mid-eighteenth century Georgia, slavery has just been legalized, and Hannah, Alex, and Brandon are about to see for themselves just what that means.  And this time around, time travel has played a trick on the boys--Brandon is now the white kid, working as a servant for a newly immigrated Anglican minister.  And Alex is now a black slave, the property of an ambitious, vicious man.   As for Hannah, she finds herself the indentured servant of that same man...one notch up from the horror of slavery, but still virtual property.    In a world where old beliefs and Christianity both hold sway, in a world where some have the power of life and death, and some have only the power to resist, Alex, Brandon, and Hannah survive as best they can, seeking not only the answer to the mystery of the skeleton in the woods, but a way to get back home....

Laing explores difficult questions with a confident hand.   The relationships between Africans, Europeans, and Native Americans in the remote Georgia frontier are fraught with fear and danger, and, without sugar-coating anything, she makes this complexity clear to the reader.   In what I think is a wise move, she avoids Alex's first person perspective on what it is like to be a white boy turned into a black slave.  But she does give him a clear voice, and allows Brandon and Alex to reflect and react both meaningfully and believably on their changed skin color, and the social consequences of that change.  The evil of slavery is confronted in a forthright way, not only through descriptions of physical abuse and hardship, but more philosophically as well--can you own someone, and still be a good person, or will having such power corrupt you?  Likewise, religion is tackled head on.  Brandon is a Southern Baptist, and a sincere Christian.  Hannah and Alex aren't.  Rather than being avoided, this is something that is talked about in the open, and something that affects Brandon's motivations back in the past.  

The historical world building is excellent.  Annette Laing quit a tenured university job teaching history to write, and it's clear that she knows her stuff.  This is not a place or period that's within my own area of historical expertise, but the details of the social structure, and the three cultures intersecting, seemed pretty good to me (although the Native Americans were mostly off-stage--the setting was primarily the cleared land of the nascent plantations.   I had only one moment of doubt in the whole book, which is pretty darn good, because I am very picky about my historical fiction.*   Others with more knowledge might, of course, find more to question.  But in short, from an educational standpoint, I highly recommend it. 

And finally, it's a pretty darn exiting story, qua story!  The three kids are not just sock puppets of Time Travel, but are very human, and the book is as much about the relationships between people as it is about the adventures of time travelling.  Hannah, in particular, is a complex and interesting character--her mother died not long ago, and she is still working through her feelings of resentment, loss, and failure.

This is my favorite of the three books in the series, and I think it can be read as a standalone--there are lots of reference to other characters met in the past in other books, but there's enough context to keep the new reader from being too confused.

*  As I said above, I found almost nothing to bother me in the details of the history.  But just for the record, my one moment of doubt occurred when Alex actually saw (or thought he saw, in a fever dream) one of the Little People who lived alongside the Native Americans--I certainly don't mind them being part of the world, because they were, and still are, here,  but the description of this Person was rather stereotypical, and the episode as a whole struck me as somewhat odd (edited to add--in that this was a manifestation from outside Alex's own culture)

"His visitor was a minuscule but perfectly-proportioned Indian warrior....He had bronzed skin, very long black hair, almost down to his ankles, and he wore only a loin cloth.  he carried a tiny bow and arrow." (page 137)

It's fine to say that people from different cultures inhabit different worlds, but it stretches credulity when things specific to one world cross into another.  But this is the only detail that actively bothered me in the whole book.

Note:  This series is independently published, and the page formatting is not standard (the top margin is very small).  But do not be put off by this! The editing is spot on, and soon you'll get used to the layout.

Disclaimer:  review copy received from the author

The Golden Door, by Emily Rodda

The Golden Door, by Emily Rodda (Scholastic Press, October 1, 2012 in the US).  If you are looking for a book that will introduce your young reader (8 or so years old) to the delightful tropes of the Quest Fantasy, you can read The Hobbit out loud, which is a lovely thing to do.  However, if you want said child to read independently (which so many of us do),  you could do much worse than offer him or her The Golden Door.  Which is to say, I think it achieves what it set out do -- it tells an entertaining story in a very appealing way.

Weld is a world within a wall.  Not a big world...actually more like a densely packed settlement.  But the space protected by the wall and its magic is the only world Rye and his brothers have ever known.  It's clear, though, that there is something outside the wall, a place where the fearsome Skimmers fly from each night, preying on the unlucky and the unwary (which is to say, eating them).

And there are those inside Weld who are getting tired of their Warden's impotence in the face of this danger:

And this graffiti-scrawled sign made me laugh out loud (I love this sign) and settle down to enjoy the story.

In a nutshell, it involves Rye's two older brothers volunteering to go hunt skimmers outside the wall, and never coming back; Rye (in good third brother style) going off to look for them.   The way out of Weld gives the traveller a choice of three doors--gold, silver, and wood--and Rye, trying to think which his oldest brother would choose, heads off through the golden door.  (It's nice that Rye's motivation is to find his brothers, whom he loves, not the usual honor and glory heroicness).

He doesn't go alone--Sonia, a girl whose been hanging around the Warden's keep for ages, trying to get through herself, convinces him to let her come with him. And they're off, confronting a strange world that holds its own strange terrors...

It is a pretty much note-perfect fantasy adventure for the eight or nine year old.  The critically reading adult might find plot points they don't care for, and have passing disbelief suspension issues (did I myself, in my adultish way, embrace it and love it to pieces? Not so much, though I read it very happily), but I think its target audience won't see any problems with it.  For them, the story of the third brother and the magic that awaits him in woods beyond the world is still fresh and new, and the splashes of humor and everyday details that Rodda throws into her mix makes this particular tale and its two main characters veryappealing.  For what it's worth, there are also scary bits, and anxious bits, and gross bits.

disclaimer:  review copy received from the publisher.

Ripley's Believe It or Not! Download the Weird

There's a new Ripley's Believe It or Not! book out in the world: Download the Weird (September 11, 2012).  Those of you who are familiar with these books know how very kid friendly they are--leave out on your coffee table and it will invariably attract any fact-hungry, curious young readers (who don't mind a bit of grotesqueness) living in your home.  

They won't read it cover to cover (that would be a bit much) but they will dip into it repeatedly, drawn by the fascinating (how a California aircraft plant was camouflaged during  WW II), the remarkable (microscopic statues), the distressing (live amphibians and fish sold in gel packs as key chain ornaments) and the yucky (the extraordinary vomit artist).  It is not just straight weird factoids--as usual, there are interviews with some of the individuals featured, making them more three dimentional, and little side boxes of extra scientific information.

I asked my own resident fan what he thought of this latest offering; it turns out that is one of his favorites, because it references other types of media (ie,YouTube) of which he is an enthusiastic consumer.  

Here's what I myself learned:  there is an island in China that I have no desire to visit.  It is only 180 acres, but is home to over 15,000 deadly pit vipers.

And here's a final thought:  if you want to give a book to the sort of fact-hungry, curious kid as a gift, but aren't certain about what they've read and haven't read, a new Ripley's book is a pretty safe bet.

disclaimer:  review copy received from the publisher.

This week's mg sff round-up (Sept. 23,2012)

 Good morning.  Here's what I found this week, scouring the internet in search of middle grade sci fi/fantasy related posts--please let me know if I missed yours!

Next week's round-up might be delayed, as I will be on my way home from Kidlitcon in NY, and my plans for Sunday morning are more along the lines of "have brunch with sister" than "get mg sff round-up done."


Update:  registration for Kidlitcon has closed, having maxed out at 175 attendees.  Wow! So many new people to meet!

Nominations for the Cybils start Oct. 1.  Here are the mg sff panelists (which includes me).  Every year, there are more Young Adult books nominated (not that I'm competitive about pointless things or anything).   Every year, worthy MG books don't make it.  Although the nominating procedures have changed somewhat, giving publishers the opportunity to fill in gaps, nominations from the floor (ie, anyone reading this!) are the backbone of the Cybils (or something).  So please feel free to nominate!  

Back to our main program.

The Reviews:  (now with all the reviews that were in the draft post I forgot about...)

Akata Witch, by Nnedi Okorafor, at Sonderbooks

Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer, at Fantasy Literature

A Circle of Cranes, by Annette LeBox, at Charlotte's Library

Circus Maximus (History Keepers), by Damian Dibben, at The Book Zone

Darkbeast, by Morgan Keyes, at Shannon Messenger

The Grimm Legacy, by Polly Shulman, at The Guardian

Goblin Secrets, by William Alexander, at Becky's Book Reviews 

Heck: Where the Bad Kids Go, by Dale Basye, at Michelle Mason 

The High Skies Adventures of Blue Jay the Pirate, by Scott Nash, at Karissa's Reading Review

The Icarus Project, by Laura Quimby, at Random Musings of a Bibliophile

Liesl and Po, by Lauren Oliver, at Books and Other Thoughts and sprite writes

Malcolm at Midnight, by W.H. Beck, at Good Books and Good Wine

Mira's Diary: Lost in Paris, by Marissa Moss, at The Fourth Musketeer 

A Mutiny in Time (Infinity Ring Book 1), by James Dashner, at Charlotte's Library

Palace of Stone, by Shannon Hale, at Bookishness 

The Peculiar, by Stephan Bachmann, at My Precious

Rewind, by William Sleator, at Time Travel Times Two

Seeing Cinderella, by Jenny Lundquist, at Ms. Yingling Reads 

The Seven Tales of Trinket, by Shelley Moore Thomas, at Night Writer

The Spindlers, by Lauren Oliver, at Imaginary Reads, My Brain On Books, and Karrisa's Reading Review

Starry River of the Sky, by Grace Lin, at One Librarian's Book Reviews

The Sweetest Spell, by Suzanne Selfors, at The Write Path and Cracking the Cover

Sword Mountain, by Nancy Yi Fan, at Semicolon 

Tuesdays at the Castle, by Jessica Day George, at Semicolon 

What Came From the Stars, by Gary Schmidt, at Maria's Melange (second of a two part joint review with part 1 from last week at The Brain Lair), and at Faith Elizabeth Hough

Two mg horror stories from Ms. Yingling Reads-- Goosebumps Most Wanted: Planet of the Lawn Gnomes, by R.L. Stine,  and Professor Gargoyle: Tales From Lovecraft Middle School #1, by Charles Gilman.

And a brief look at  two great mg fantasy series--The Theodosia books, by R. L. LaFevers, and The Joy of Spooking series, by P.J. Pracegirldle, at Charlotte's Library

Authors and Interviews

Philip Pullman talks about rewriting Grimm at The Guardian

Morgan Keyes (Darkbeast) at The O.W.L. 

Derek Taylor Kent (aka Derek the Ghost, author of Scary School) at Cracking the Cover 

Caitlen Rubino-Bradway (Ordinary Magic) at Chicklish

China Mieville is interviewed by a very smart 12 year old at The Guardian

And also via The Guardian is this podcast of Jacqueline Wilson reading from, and talking about, her new Nesbit homage/sequel, Four Children and It.

Other Good Stuff:

Of course, the best of the Good Stuff is the new Hobbit trailer

The short list for the Roal Dahl funny prize has been announced (here's The Guardian's discussion), with sff nicely represented

Terri Windling talks fairy tales at Seven Miles of Steel Thistles

Pottermore has new back to school content (via The Guardian)

Vintage ads for libraries and reading...if you want to become a scary robot looking girl, there's nothing like a book (the larger the picture gets, the scarier it looks--the expressionless face, the staring eyes...):

And finally, a random tip:  If you buy expensive art wallpaper, don't wipe it with a wet sponge.  You will wipe off the expensive art part.

Catching up with Cybils review copies from yesteryears....Part 1--two smart, eccentric girls

Nominations for the upcoming Cybils season start on October 1 (which I find just tremendously exciting, even though I am sad that I am never awake right when the starting line happens, and when I do wake up, other people have beaten me to my best loved books....).   However, some of us just happen to have little shelves next to our computers on which there sit books received for review from Cybils past...there are just so many of them to read and review (150ish in mg sff last year) that one can't do them all during the fall.  And then after the Cybils, I kind of want to catch up on everything else I missed while reading the past year's mg sff....and so every year a few books that I really enjoyed and wanted to review end up gathering dust.

So today, with mingled thanks and apologies to the publishers who sent these books to me, I am Catching Up. 

These two books are perfect for the intelligent, quirky girl reader (although if an intelligent boy were to read them, he'd probably like them too).

Theodosia and the Eyes of Horus, by R. L. La Fevers (Houghton Mifflin, 2010) .   You might recognize the name of the author--she's just made a big splash with Grave Mercy, a top notch YA historical fantasy.  But before that, she wrote two lovely mg serieses--Nathaniel Fludd, Beastologist, and the Theodosia series.  The titular heroine of the later series is a 19th century Egyptologist, who practically lives in the London museum of Egyptian antiquities run by her parents.  Theodosia has a preternatural sensitivity to Egyptian magic (which involves lots of nasty curses), which gets her into trouble on more than one occasion, but which also allows her to save the day when bad guys want to steal priceless magical artifacts and use them for nefarious purposes....

Theodosia is smart and appealing, there are lots of interesting side characters, and the Egyptian magical side of things is fascinating (even for those of us who aren't particularly fond of Egyptian fantasy).

This is the third of the series; you can read about all four books here.

Unearthly Asylum, by P.J. Pracegirldle (The Joy of Spooking, Book 2)

Here's another somewhat overlooked series that features a smart girl with a mission.  In this series, Joy Wells is determined to prove that famous horror writer E.A. Peugeot lived in her home village of Spooking, using it as fodder for his stories.  And Spooking, barely clinging to any semblance of habitable village-ness, and home to a really really sinister asylum, certainly offers fodder aplenty.

When Joy starts hearing what she assumes are the guns of long dead stories, as described in a Peugot story coming from the asylum, she's determined to get to the bottom of what exactly is going on behind its locked gates.  What she unravels is a horror story of madness and greed...

If you are looking for a series to give to the ten or eleven year old girl who loves mysteries and scary stories, with smart and eccentric heroines, the three books in the Joy of Spooking series are pretty perfect.


(and just a small rant--I hate you new blogger.  I hate that I cannot easily make these two book covers the same size.  grrr.).