Glamourist Histories: Shades of Milk and Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal

Glamourist Histories Book 1
Shades of Milk and Honey
ISBN: 9780765325600
Jane Austen with magic.

A delightful romp through Austen-inspired Regency family drama.

Jane lives with her father, her munchausens-afflicted mother, and her preternaturally beautiful younger sister Melody, and it's getting to be time for that younger sister to be married safely off to one of the young lords of the neighborhood.  Jane has no illusions to her own prospects; she's plain and gawky, with no grace in dancing or flawless social manners.  She is, however, a fair hand at glamour, that invisible ethereal substance that can be worked upon to create illusions and pretty fancies.  It's a natural gift of hers, but sadly, not any more useful nor marketable than the other basic social graces.

While the family plots to get Melody attached, Melody has plans of her own, and Jane discovers that their neighbor has an acclaimed glamourist on-site, working beautiful magics on their house.  Too bad she can't stand him!

I really don't know what else to say about this book.  If you love Austen and enjoy Regency manners, then this adds a light touch of magical frosting to the idea.  It's a lovely stand-alone book, despite sparking a series afterwards, and it's sweet and lighthearted and clever.

YA Fantasy: The Orphan Queen, Jodi Meadows

The Orphan Queen
Jodi Meadows
ISBN: 9780062317384
Traditional "western european" YA fantasy sets a young exiled princess against a conquering kingdom and a murderous magical incursion.  First in a projected series, with a GIANT CLIFFHANGER ENDING!

First things first: I read this immediately after devouring two other fantasy series back to back, by absolute masters of the craft, and THEN I read another very similarly plotted book immediately afterwards, which was flat-out one of the best fantasy-fairy-tale adaptations I've ever been blessed to read.  So I'm going to be a little sharp here, and it really is unfair of me, because this book was not bad.  It wasn't even mediocre, it just - wasn't at the very top of the heap, and that's where everything else this week was, so this suffers unjustly by the comparison.

With that in mind: a decent start-up to a series, with a Hunger Games inspired cliffhanger for the ending.  Sadly, I wasn't invested enough in the characters to actually care one way or the other about said cliffhanger, and I won't be particularly looking out for the next in the series.  Now, if it happens to come up, or cross my desk, I'll certainly read it - it was an interesting set-up, and I'm curious to know where things will go - just, more in an academic sort of way.


List of unfortunate things:
Character names don't make any damn sense.  This is a stereotypical white western european fantasy medieval/Victorian setting.  Please just pick a real medieval kingdom to pretend the characters are from, and choose names from there: France, Germany, Poland, wherever!  Just don't name one girl Wilhemina, another Quinn, another Teresa, and yet a different girl Paige, and expect me to not slip a few gears.

The "spy ring" was not so great.  Naming yourselves (and identifying as such to potential enemies or informants, and wearing clothes embroidered with the representation of such) after the heraldric creature of the fallen kingdom is sweet, but it's also stupid dangerous when living in enemy territory.  My desire to think of the main character and the group as a whole as competent and formidable was straining against this the entire book.  My opinion was also not helped by the main character's utter uselessness at an infiltration that had apparently been planned for quite some time.  I know they're all kids, but they're all trained and espionage-hardened kids, or at least that's what they're supposed to be.

The rationale behind going to the "mysterious location" in a totally different kingdom was really stretched.  When the character was explaining her motives to another person, I could just see the author explaining the reasons to an editor, who just nodded with a glazed look under the torrent of words.  Set up your plotting better, so decisions and events are actually important to the character's stated goals.

Have you ever seen Zorro: The Gay Blade?  If not, go see it, I'll wait.  Back now?  There's a very "Zorro" character here, and it was super obvious, and a little forced.  While I liked the masked version of the character, I had to restrain myself from rolling my eyes otherwise.  Cute, decently executed, but so very obvious.



List of enjoyable things:
Wil was an awesome lead, despite being utterly useless at most of her life choices.  She made her decisions, stuck to them, and mostly (despite one glaring plot-rail) had in-character reasons for them.  She had agency, personality, and an interesting background conflict.

The growing relationship and partnership with "Zorro" was meet-cute.

The plot concept was nifty, and has potential for interesting developments through the series.  The "magic gone bad" concept is sort of hot now, but this version also has intro-country political repercussions (slim and plot-dependent, but actually acknowledged) of the magic problem, and attempts to solve it in earlier years.

The lead friendship was very well drawn.

The "mysterious location" was, on reflection, one of the best parts of the book - it was supremely creepy and paced well.


All in all, a fun way to spend an afternoon.  

Tuesday Storytime: Going to the Beach

Posting late this week, can you tell summer is coming?   O.o

The Twelve Days of Summer
Elizabeth Lee O'Donnell, illustrated by Karen Lee Schmidt
ISBN: 0688082033
Whimsical colorful drawings of a beach, with clever uses of borders for the increasing menagerie.

Instead of the twelve days of christmas "fiiiiiive golden rings" and etc., here we have the days of summer, notated by increasing amounts of various beach animals (plus waves, oddly enough).  It's well-written, the lines scan, the wordplay is interesting without being tongue-tying (six squid a-swimming) and the scenes depicted continually get zanier and zanier as the animal numbers grow.  As a bonus, our "little purple sea anemone" (which I've been humming since Tuesday, thanks ever so) is hidden on each page, regardless of the scope of the composition.  Well played.


Penguin on Vacation
Salina Yoon
ISBN: 9780802733979
Cute blocky "newsprint comic" style artwork enlivens a slender tale of a Penguin and Crab.

Penguin is sick of snow.  Snowballs, snow forts, snowskiing, snowsledding, all of it.  He's headed somewhere tropical!  Sadly, he's not exactly prepared for the reality of the beach - you can't skate on sand, after all.  A helpful crab wanders in to the story, teaches some good beach games, and then heads off to the pole for his own winter vacation.  The ending is strangely done - Crab visits the pole, leaves, then comes back again a year later for another visit, while Penguin doesn't travel back to the beach.  Kids won't notice, but I did, and wondered why the story was structured like that?  Regardless, adorable and a very short read.


The Seashore Book
Charlotte Zolotow, painted by Wendell Minor
ISBN: 0060202149
Beautiful paintings of serene seascapes adorn a sweet but slow narrative.

I really hesitated over this one, and I'm glad I had a smaller, more sedate group for Storytime, because with a larger crowd, or with some of my more energetic kids, this would have gone over like a lead balloon.  It's beautiful, and descriptive, and not actually very long, but it's all essentially a dream sequence, and it's simply not very exciting - it just narrates a stereotypical "platonic ideal" of a day at the beach, from before sunrise to after dark.  It worked, and everything was lovely, but it very easily could have been simply too sedate.

Tuesday Storytime: Big City Life

Only two more weeks before the Summer Reading Program kicks in, and we're all about the heroes and villains at that point.

For today, we're looking at life in the big city.


Blackout
John Rocco
ISBN: 9781423121909
Caldecott Honor book, large-format comic-book panels with minimal descriptive narration.

I am ambivalent about this book.  I love it as a personal read, and I've had a lot of luck with it in one-on-one sessions, where it becomes less a "story" and more an exploration of the event that is depicted (a city-wide blackout that lasts for a few hours, through the lens of a young child who is desperate for their busy family to play a board-game with them.)  On the other hand, the almost totally wordless  nature of the book makes much less suited for storytime, even though the story and the concepts are really perfectly suited for this age-group.  It's frustrating to try and balance being true to the book as written, and the desire to explain and narrate so that the younger kids, or the ones further back in the rows who can't see the action in the panels clearly, have a chance to understand what is going on.  I always feel like I'm doing the creator a disservice regardless of what I choose.  I hate that I feel this way, because I love the comic style, and I love the storyline itself, I just don't feel like this is the best setting for it.


Count on the Subway
Paul Dubois Jacobs and Jennifer Swender, illustrations by Dan Yaccarino
ISBN: 9780307979230
Yaccarino's distinctive pop-art livens a quick by-the-numbers run through the subway system.

I love this book!  So cute and lively and the rhymes are so nifty and cleverly hidden in the numbers.  A count up to ten, then back down to one, and ending in Grand Central Station, all through the perspective of a young girl and her mother, traversing the subway in the most matter-of-fact manner.  Too adorable for words, and a perfect representation of the very different realities of life in the city that my rural storytime kids have no experience with.


All Through My Town
Jean Reidy, illustrations by Leo Timmers
ISBN: 9781619630291
Overstuffed and busy, with few grounding reference points in the text or illustrations.

I liked this one when I pre-read it, but when I started it in storytime, I realized it was much too busy and unfocused to be a keeper.  The storyline is meandering - starting in the morning and the rhymes reference the buildings and events on the page as the day progresses, but there is no solid reference to time of day or to the buildings/events that are referenced, just the onomatopoeic language of the references; "shopping, sacking, sorting, stacking - rows so nice and neat" with an illustration of a market of some sort.  I wanted to like it, and it wasn't bad, especially with the fun language throughout, but it was confusing to the kids, sadly.  Would be really good with a classroom or one-on-one to ask "what sort of place do you think this is?" for each page and circumstance, and to refer that back to the kids' experiences with their own grocery stores, libraries, and streets.

Movie Novelizations: MCU Phase One, The Avengers, Alex Irvine

I found this in the bookstore and couldn't resist the lovely cover!

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Phase One, The Avengers
Alex Irvine
ISBN: 9780316256377
MG novelization of the 2012 movie, The Avengers.

To state the obvious first, this is an actual novelization of the film, and therefore has all of the scenes and events of the film in order, all the way to completion.  This is not a "teaser" or a "movie storybook" with character bios or plot hints.

I was interested to see what sort of changes and omissions would be necessary to make The Avengers (overseas title: Avengers Assemble) into a MG-level book as far as content, and I have to say that I was impressed with the deft handling of the storyline, characters, and content.

I may possibly be a giant MCU fangirl, and so there were a couple of places where I have quibbles about the dialogue - please note that these aren't the places where certain not-so-PG comments are elided or rephrased, but other sections of dialogue that I felt were unclear or badly formatted.  Dialogue is seriously difficult, and transcribing actual human speech, even in an environment as structured as a script, is even more difficult.  It is impressive that Irvine got as much of Whedon's patter down in a manner I felt was satisfying, so the few bits I read as flubs sadly stood out quite a lot to me.

As far as the PG alterations, here's what I noticed:
1) Black Widow's introductory scene is handled beautifully by simply refusing to comment on her clothing.

2) In the scene with Barton, Loki, and Selvig, Loki's query as to what Barton needs garners a different response: "I need a distraction" he says, "and a biometric ID" instead of the slightly more disturbing comment in the film.

3) In related plot-developments, Loki doesn't gouge out any body parts in Stuttgart.

4) The Loki/Black Widow interrogation scene omits a certain nasty British imprecation.

5) Banner's despairing speech about Hulk's utter invincibility is left as an implication of suicide, with the actual description of his attempt left entirely out.

Now, oddly enough, despite all that, Cap still gets to call aliens "bastards" in the final battle, and I'm not sure if they just missed that one, or decided it was their single use and better make it a good one.  It isn't like I mind language (although that it's CAP's language is especially amusing, given Ultron's running joke) but when it's the only instance in the whole book, it does become rather more noticeable and a bit jarring.

This one was super cute, and now I'm planning to hunt up the other ones.




 

Juv Nonfiction: An Egg is Quiet, Dianna Aston & Sylvia Long

And guess what got returned to the library today?

An Egg is Quiet
Dianna Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long
ISBN: 9780811844284
Beautiful and evocative biology/naturalist illustrations and descriptions.

I was very excited about A Nest is Noisy, and mentioned this earlier book in the review, so when this one came back across the counter, I decided to go ahead and talk a bit about this one also.  The two go together so very well, I think.

The doubled end-papers are here also, with a mottled-egg-spotchy outer endpapers, and a collection of all the eggs on the front inner set - eggs that I must note included sea animals, insects, and reptiles.  What I find lovely about this is that the BACK inner set of end-papers don't have the eggs.  What do you think they have instead?  :)

This earlier book has much less text to it - the flowing script guides us simply and succinctly through varied colors and shapes of eggs, before finally getting a bit more meaty with the camouflage, and then immediately tapering back off again to look at sizes, designs, textures, and fossils.  Our last spread gives us an overview of development, looking at a chicken for the birds, a salmon for the fish/reptiles, and a grasshopper for the insect world.

Such a beautiful book.

New Arrivals: Fairy Tales: Hansel & Gretel, Neil Gaiman and Lorenzo Mattotti

I've been waiting FOREVER go get my hands on this little creepy beauty!  For lovers of Gorey and the Addamses, here is the grimdark inky-washed terrifying tale of Hansel and Gretel in all it's original frightful glory.

Hansel & Gretel
Neil Gaiman, illustrations by Lorenzo Mattotti
ISBN: 9781935179627


This is a DARK story.  Mattotti's illustrations are mostly thick opaque swaths of blackness, crowding across the page and looming over the chinks of light and the outline figures of our characters.  Trees reach over and clutch, houses ooze darkness from the walls, rooms become wicker cages with tendrils of blackness twining to bar the light.

This is a DARK story.  Gaiman does away with the attempts to lighten the mood - the kids are abandoned by their parents; mother and father conspire, and while father is not an enthusiastic participant, he is an active party.  The story lingers on macabre descriptions of food, the bloody hanks of meat brought from the butcher, bejewelled with green flies and yellow wasps, the weak broth of old cabbage, the hard crunch of dry bread, the unabashed desire of the old woman for meat.  Even Gretel is more purposeful and hardened - her defiant shove not a mad swing of inspiration and luck, but a carefully plotted and cultivated goal.

This is how fairy tales were - warnings against the evil of mankind, using witches and old women in the woods as allegorical threats to balance against the very real threats of cruel parents or desperate starving times.

Brilliant.  A facet of obsidian lit by the last rays of a dying day, fierce in inky cold sharpness.

New Arrivals: Juv Nonfiction: A Rock Can Be... , Laura Purdie Salas, Violeta Dabija

We're just rolling in the natural history goodness over here these days.

A Rock Can Be...
Laura Purdie Salas, illustrated by Violeta Dabija
ISBN: 9781467721103
A poetic exploration of what rocks can (or could) be, with soft illustrations reminding me of One White Wishing Stone.

I love the sweet simplicity of this rhyming sequence, and the often-surprising contrasts that are created in the adjacent rhymes.  The visual imagery in "desert dune / harvest moon" is stunning, but even more mentally interesting is the concept match between "Harbor protector / Land connector" showing a rock-embraced round harbor, which is echoed in reverse by a sweep of river arced across by graceful stone bridges.

The rhyme itself is short, leaving four pages at the end for a discussion of rocks and of each of the specific call-outs that the rhymes use, of a Glossary, and a Further Reading selection.

Descriptive, evocative, and inspiring.  Nonfiction can be so beautiful!  

New Arrivals: Juv Nonfiction: A Nest Is Noisy, Diana Hutts Aston, Sylvia Long

By the duo that did An Egg is Quiet, which I should also review at some point - it's delightful as well, and goes beautifully with this new one.

A Nest is Noisy
Dianna Hutts Aston, illustrated by Sylvia Long
ISBN: 9781452127132
Double sets of end-papers, y'all!  The outer set (the actual physical endpapers) are a beautiful tangle of nest material, and the inner set is a spread of all the types of nests (labeled!) that are featured in the actual book.

Books like this make me despair of becoming a good writer myself eventually, because I find myself without the words to explain how beautiful and delightful this book is.  The text is luminous, the examples concrete and quirky.  The illustrations are expressive and individualized, but are also representational and specific.  The flow of the narrative is often clunky in nonfiction, but here we travel smoothly from types of nest (and the notation that nests don't require birds) through environments and habitats, all with specific paragraph-or-longer descriptions of specific animal nests with pertinent information and quirky factoids, through to the end where the beautiful luminous poetry of the overall narrative flow picks back up and carries us to the very end - a quiet nest nestled into an oak branchlet against a dusky sky.

So beautiful.  I just love that there are beautiful creations like this for kids to look at and to learn about and appreciate the wonders around them.

New Arrivals: Juv Nonfiction: The Next Wave, Elizabeth Rusch

The Next Wave: The Quest to Harness the Power of the Oceans
Elizabeth Rusch, photo credits various.
ISBN: 9780544099999
Part of the Scientists in the Field series by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt


These new science nonfictions that are coming out are really quality books.  This one reminded me a lot of the dolphin study book that came in last year, but in this case, we're investigating the state of wave-generated-electricity systems.  

The book focuses on two main groups of scientists: a duo (then trio) of Mikes who have an ocean-floor-based device that uses variations in water pressure to generate electricity, and professor and inventor Annette von Jouanne who not only invented one of the first functional wave-energy buoys, but spends her career working with agencies to create and develop testing locations and policies to help others refine and improve their own devices.

These two groups aren't the only ones discussed - there are breakout panels from sidebars to full spreads that detail other groups and their successes or failures (one especially poignant and frustrating story to read about was the sinking in 2007 of the prototype device "AquaBuOY" which performed beautifully for months, but then sank into 115-foot ocean waters due to a failure in its ballast tanks.  A salvage operation was required by the testing contract, and bankrupted the company, and the sinking made the news where the successful months-long operation did not.  That failure set the entire industry back by years, as investors pulled their funding from anything that seemed similar.  How frustrating that must be for the scientists - I was upset just reading about it!

I love that the book is careful to explain everything, but doesn't go out of the way to simplify or minimize the complexity of the science involved.  Everything necessary to understand the concept is explained and defined in simple terms, but the complicated approaches to generating electricity in various different ways from wave movement are not simplified or elided.  I find that it is really encouraging and motivational for readers to not be talked down to, so I'm all about this approach.

Excellent book, excellent topic.  I can't wait to see the next one in the series!

 

Juv Fantasy Sequel: Stolen Magic, Gail Carson Levine

Stolen Magic
Gail Carson Levine
ISBN: 9780061706370
Sequel to A Tale of Two Castles, reviewed here. (much scrolling required)

Mansioner (actress) and Detective's Assistant Elodie is returning to her rural island home after the whirlwind events in the mainland capital in A Tale of Two Castles.  To her great pleasure, her boss, the gender-unspecified dragon Meenore, and the sweet but frightening ogre Count Jonty Um (and his dog) are coming with her to meet her parents and see where she grew up!

Unfortunately, they've barely landed on the island before they are detoured; first by a blizzard, and second by a crisis brewing at the island's central monastery.  A magical relic must remain in contact with it's resting place to perform the magic necessary to keep the island, formed of seven active volcanoes, from erupting and killing everyone.  Someone has stolen the relic, and now the nearest mountain will blow in just a few days, unless the thief is discovered and the relic returned.

Elodie and Meenore are on the case, and Elodie makes a new friend in the young ward of a rich visitor, sheltering from the blizzard.  The story obviously has to rid itself of both Count Jonty and of Meenore for Elodie's mansioning and detecting to shine, but I admire the natural and character-driven way that Levine accomplishes getting rid of the relevant adults to let the kids run with the case.

Despite being a magical environment, the story is down-to-earth with logic, observation, cleverness, and persistence as the traits celebrated and admired, both by readers and by the characters in the story.  The ending, where Elodie finally accomplishes her goal after much side-tracking, is a bit tacked-on, and there remains a mystery around Elodie's acting mentor; why is he working as a farm laborer, out on a rural, out of the way island community?

The ending sets up a potential for another installment, and if so, I'll be happy to read it also.

Graphic Novel (re-read): American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang

A new "Comic Book Club" has started at the library, and the first read was Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese.  I read this initially in librarian school, and very much enjoyed it (despite the discomfort of the racism it dealt with) and it was nice to revisit with a community book club instead of in a scholarly setting.  The discussion was fun and lively, and touched a lot on the issues of racism and self-acceptance, and on the interesting inclusion of aspects of Christian iconography.

American Born Chinese
Gene Luen Yang
ISBN: 9780312384487
Prinz Award winner.  Graphic Novel.  3 different stories progress in alternating chapters, entwining only at the very end.  

Story 1: A Monkey King arises to lead the monkeys, and he improves himself through discipline and through study and hard work.  He's content until he tries to crash a party held by the King of Heaven, and is denied entrance because - well - he IS a monkey.  Bare feet and monkey stink and everything.  Now he's ashamed of himself, and pissed as hell at the other gods for making him feel bad.

Story 2: In elementary school, Jin Wang tries to survive the casual racism of his school, and reluctantly befriends even newer arrival Wei-Chen Sun.  School remains fairly awful, but their friendship helps them make it through to middle school and the beginnings of dating and social lives.

Story 3: High-schooler Danny is horrified that his cousin Chin-kee (not kidding), a hideous "yellow-peril" racist-illustrated (seriously, his skin is GREEN) walking offensive stereotype (yes, he pees in someone's Coke) has come to visit and attend school with him.  Danny tiptoes, blushes, and cringes through the day as Chin-kee entertains the school with horrible racist antics.

The most interesting part about this story is that it is truly one story.  How the three combine into a cohesive whole is a truly enlightening discovery.  Meanwhile, the themes and pointed observations of each story are echoed in the others in a really satisfying way, making the ultimate enmeshing much more organic and earned.

 

Tuesday Storytime: Hippos!

And before you ask, yes there are LOTS of hippopotamus stories.  So many.  Here are my favorite three:

The Hippo-NOT-amus
Tony and Jan Payne, illustrations by Guy Parker-Rees
ISBN: 0439564182
Boisterous colors and compositions enliven an already silly story about accepting who you are.

Portly is a baby hippo (love the name) who is sick of boring lying in the water, and boring old grass to eat.  He's going out into the world to see whether any other animals have it better.  By the end of the story, he's not a hippo any longer, he's a hippo-ger-ele-bat-onoceros, tottering around on stilts, with bananas hanging from each foot, and wooden horns and a vine trunk hanging from his nose.  How he gets to that point is the fun of the story, and I love that the parents are kind and accepting of their kid's explorations of his identity.


Hilda Must Be Dancing
Karma Wilson, illustrated by Suzanne Watts
ISBN: 0689847882
Vibrant but soft-edged paintings feature lots of purples and blues.

Hilda Hippo loves to dance, but her moves are causing earthquakes and giant messes.  Her jungle friends try to get her into various sedate hobbies: knitting, singing... until they try swimming, which she interprets as water ballet, to her and everyone elses' newfound happiness.  Really cute, and fairly short for the story involved.  Lots of dancy noises and onomatopoeic words tho.


The Hiccupotamus
Aaron Zenz
ISBN: 9780761456223
Zany fun with exaggerated animals in primary colors, with expressive bodies and faces.

Our unnamed hippo hero has a horrid case of the hiccups, which is causing havoc.  (I'll stop now.)  In desperation, after several messy (and tongue-twisting) accidents, his friends get together to cure him, to no avail, until the hiccups finally fade out of their own accord - just in time to spring up somewhere else!  Seriously difficult to get through, because of the made-up combined singsong words.  An example: "She chased him toward a centipede/Pouring new cemetipede/He hic'ed by accidentipede/And tripped the elephantipede."  Sheesh.  Despite the challenge, it's great fun to read and to see the kids giggle at the silly situations and sillier language.

Tuesday Storytime: Mother's Day

Shocked and amazed that there were still Mothers' Day books to choose from on the shelves, so I took it as a mandate to actually correspond with a day of celebration for once.

Bedtime for Mommy
Amy Krouse Rosenthal, illustrated by LeUyen Pham
ISBN: 9781599903415
Vibrant expressive watercolor-and-sketch faces and postures.

I can't believe I haven't done this book for storytime for so long.  I discovered it when it came out, fell in love, and bought it for myself immediately (that happens with me and picture books sometimes).  I've used it for storytimes before, but it must have been a while back.  It's short, adorable, nearly wordless, and made of little vignettes.  Roles are reversed for a whole night while the young girl puts Mommy to bed - with the whole process chronicled, from the inevitable "5 more minutes" to the selecting and reading of the bedtime story (Anna Karenina) to the precise adjustment of the width of the door opening.  And of course the coda is that now it's time for the same process with Daddy.  Just simply adorable.


Bee Frog
Martin Waddell, illustrated by Barbara Firth
ISBN: 9780763633103
Cute perky watercolor frogs in a cute and very short story.

If it weren't for the illustrations, I don't think I'd bother with this slight tale of a baby frog who pretends she's a dragon, gets ignored by her family when she tries to play pretend with them (they're working or reading or sleeping) so she runs away to play by herself, gets bored, and her family comes looking for her.  But, the illustrations are so adorable, the story gets away with being a little twee.  Besides, it's a nice very young-focused entry on the "nobody loves me, everybody hates me, guess I'll go eat worms" impulse that young ones get when they're feeling unjustly treated by the universe at large.


My Monster Mama Loves Me So
Laura Leuk, illustrated by Mark Buehner
ISBN: 9780688168667
Bright dayglow highlight colors and rich saturated dark pages.  Very "Monsters, INC."

A cute little green monster narrates what his Mama does for him, from baking cookies with bugs in, to taking him to the swamp to swim, to teaching him to brush his fangs, all of which shows how she loves him.  Very cute introduction to "scary" monster tropes like bats and spiders and dark nights, all talked about as comforting or lovable.

YA: Fallout (Lois Lane), by Gwenda Bond

Fallout (Lois Lane) 
Gwenda Bond
ISBN: 9781630790059
Read April 28, 2015

Lois Lane often gets relegated to the shadows in Superman stories.  Or, even worse, exists as a victim to rescue, or a sacrifice to fridge to up the angst points in our Man of Steel.  It's about damn time we hear from her in her own voice, and man, what a strong vibrant voice this is.

Bond starts with a teen Lois finally landing in Metropolis, after a string of moves and a dismal career of getting into trouble at various schools, all with the best of intentions.  Now tho, she has great resolutions, and she's going to be scholastic, invisible, and stay out of trouble.  That lasts for the literal minute it takes before she overhears her new principal haughtily rebuffing a loquacious young lady pleading for help; she's being bullied by the school super-stars, a freaky synchronized gang of youngsters who are part of a pilot collaboration between the school and a local technical and development company.

Before Lois can even get her class schedule, she's made enemies of the principal and the gang (the ominously named Warheads), and even the bullied girl wants her to just go away and leave her to her inevitable fate.  But our heroine is nothing if not tenacious, and she'll get her story, and save the girl while she's at it.

Everything about this book is lovely.  The sweet but still-innocent txt relationship between her and SmallvilleGuy in Kansas, the contrast between Lois' foolhardy and courageous exterior and her worried and insecure feelings, the tentative developing friendship between the debut members of The Daily Scoop (the Planet's teen-run online offshoot).

I especially like that Lois is willing to admit that she needs help, and to accept it from people (although grudgingly) but she is also more than willing to do what needs to be done on her own, and to shield her friends and companions from her reckless actions.  On that same note, it was nice to see certain super-powered persons relegated to a chatroom window, some text-messages, and a couple of instances of nerfed avatars in an online multiplayer game.  Lois deserves the chance to be seen standing on her own, and in this book, she does just that, and does it ferociously.

I really hope there's a sequel.

YA Dystopia: HIT, by Delilah Dawson

Do you ever read the fine print?  Perhaps you should start.

HIT
Delilah Dawson
ISBN: 9781481423397
Read April 26, 2015

On the plus side, the National Debt is gone.  On the downside, Valor National Bank (now just Valor National) is taking out the nation's fiscal dead weight.  Patsy gets caught up in the chaotic first five days of the national takeover, and she's got some hard work ahead of her.  You see, Patsy's mom had a string of bad luck, and a great deal of credit card debt.  

Now either the creepy Matrix-like agent shoots mom and Patsy both and burns down their house, OR Patsy takes his nice little 9mm and goes and offs the next 10 people who owe Valor more than they're worth.  She has 5 days to finish.

Along the way she is going to figure out a lot of things, including what sort of person she is that she could kill and extort strangers so readily.

This book is literally killer, and I really loved how Dawson didn't shy away from the emotional and physical repercussions of premeditated murder and physical violence on a person - especially one who never imagined themselves in this sort of situation.  The honesty there really did a lot to balance out the ultra-violent scenes of death and mayhem.

One final note, there is a dog, but you needn't worry - this isn't THAT sort of book.

Juv Quartet: The Years, by Andrea Cheng

I picked these up because we're reading American Born Chinese for a local bookclub, and I wondered if there were any recent books that would address a lot of those concerns for a younger set.

The Year of the Book
Andrea Cheng, illustrated by Abigail Halpin
ISBN: 9780547684635

The Year of the Baby
Andrea Cheng, illustrated by Patrice Barton
ISBN: 9780547910673

The Year of the Fortune Cookie
Andrea Cheng, illustrated by Patrice Barton
ISBN: 9780544105195

The Year of the Three Sisters
Andrea Cheng, illustrated by Patrice Barton
ISBN: 9780544344273

I like how well these flow together (read all of them in two afternoons) and how they include sub-plots for each character that is introduced.  Our lead is Anna, who is an American-Born Chinese girl living in Cincinnati with her parents and her younger brother.  As the stories progress, she matures from an impulsive bookaholic who is slightly embarassed by her heritage into a graceful. literate, (still impulsive, but working on it) young lady who visits China and hosts exchange students.

In addition, the supporting cast is lovely.  There are other girls who come and go through the series: best friend Laura, new friends Camille and Andee, and Chinese friend Fan.  All of the girls are sketched out in interesting shades: Laura has to deal with an overbearing mother and her parents' separation/divorce.  Camille has a learning disorder.  Andee's family is wealthy, and she tries too hard to help people sometimes.  Fan is a migrant worker from Beijing, and is determined to study and work her hardest in America while she has the opportunity.  All of these girls interact with each other and revolve around each other (each one becoming more or less important depending on the individual storyline) in a very realistic manner.

I still think that I like the Violet Mackerel books better than these, but for a slightly older audience who wants to read easy chapter books about interesting and diverse characters, this is a solid sell.

YA Dystopia: The Glass Arrow, Kristen Simmons

The Glass Arrow
Kristen Simmons
ISBN: 9780765336613
YA Dystopia
Read April 24, 2015

This wasn't a bad book, but I wanted a lot more from it than it gave.  The premise is sketchy, but interesting: women somehow caused an uprising, and now pregnancy uncommon, and male birthrate is very low.  Thus, women are considered property, and young girls are sheltered in "Gardens" before being auctioned off to the highest bidder; unless of course they're willing to hide out in the wilderness and live off the land.  Even those wild folk have to worry about their girls being hunted down - they're generally considered to be more fertile.

That's our info-dump, and that's really all we get through the whole book.  There's a whole society of people who manage to live out in the wilds fairly happily, but they're not the focus so we don't learn much about them.  The actual history of why women were targeted in the first place is presented as mythology, leading me to hope that it wasn't intended to be the real rationale behind the development of this misogynistic society.

That's my biggest gripe with dystopian YA in general - there's just not enough worldbuilding for me to be really engaged in the story.  I want to know the backgrounds, and the history, and the culture, and the development of this crazy world, even if the main characters aren't able to understand or see how it works, I (as a reader) want to know that information is there and being considered.

I don't mean to say that this book is bad, just I really wanted some more depth to the world.  It was a light, enjoyable read, that was straightforward about personhood and autonomy and self-determination, and I really appreciated that.