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.