Under the Green Hill - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. This week's book is:

Sullivan, Laura. Under the Green Hill. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/10043234]

Booktalk:

     "It's like in The Lion, the Witch and the Whachamacallit," Silly said, opening the door.
     "Wardrobe," Meg said.
     "Yup, that's it. Look, it's full of furs, too, just like the one in the book. I wonder if there's a passageway to a secret world."
     "We have enough to do here with the fairies without finding another world full of trouble," Meg said testily.

p.123

When a dangerous fever breaks out in the States, the Morgan children: Rowan, Meg, Silly, and James, are sent to England to stay with relatives for the summer. And haughty Finn and allergy-stricken Dickie are going with them. As they head to the Rookery, their great-aunt and -uncle's house, the Morgan children expect to spend a long summer in the company of tiresome elderly people. Finn's more concerned about the lack of electricity and Dickie's worried about all the pollen in those famous English gardens. Needless to say, none of them are excited. But when they get to the Rookery, they find a house of busy people getting ready for a midnight festival and themselves packed off to bed, forbidden to leave the grounds. Nothing is more exiting than that which is forbidden, so the Morgans, Finn, and Dickie sneak out to join the festivities, and what they find will change the course of the summer and possibly their lives.

Review:
As you may have guessed from this blog's title and header, I'm a bit partial to kids in unfamiliar old houses who stumble upon magical worlds. Extra points if that old house is in the English countryside. Extra, extra points if the kids get caught up in an epic war requiring brave heroics. There was never any doubt in my mind that I would love Under the Green Hill.

I want to be so very grown-up and objective and say that what I found so attractive in this book was its own sense of place in and reverence to the tradition of books about kids in unfamiliar old houses, so on and so forth. Or that I loved the allusions to other fairy/faerie stories that I caught but will probably fly over the heads of young readers. Or that I was excited about a middle grade book featuring a position of power passed down through the maternal line, with almost inconsequential (but loved!) husbands marrying into the family to help produce the all important female heir and spare. Or even that I was enchanted by Sullivan's use of language. For example:

Dickie could tell it was extraordinary just from the smell. An odor of knowledge permeated the air, ghosts of arcane secrets wafted about by the breeze the children made when they opened the door. Here were books more rare than any first editions. ... The air seemed stale, as though no one had visited that room in decades. But, oddly, though there was dust on all visible surfaces, the library didn't make Dickie sneeze. Books have their own peculiar kind of dustiness, which didn't catch in his nose the same way cat's hair or thistle pollen might.

p.119

I could say all of that, and it would all be true (especially that last one). But what really made me fall in love with Under the Green Hill was the story, pure and simple. I'm a sucker for a good fantasy adventure, and this one is full of that goodness: a beautiful setting that is recognizable but still full of fantastical elements, betrayal, swamp monsters, life and death stakes, war-training, a wise benefactress who one can only hope will make everything okay, an enemy that isn't so evil that anyone really wants to kill him, a sensible sister who tries to be the voice of reason, and a brother hell-bent on grand acts of heroism. Plus an added bonus (that I'm also a sucker for): a selkie!

So Finn, Dickie, and even youngest brother James are a bit underdeveloped. That's okay; they each serve their purpose in the story, hindering or helping the rest of the Morgans along. There's also a little ambiguity in the beginning about when this story is set. It feels like it should be set in the past, between World Wars perhaps, what with the incurable fever ravaging America's children and names like Finn, Rowan and Dickie, but Finn despairs about the DVDs and video games he brought with him to England but can't use since the Rookery has no electricity. It's also possible that I projected a former time on a book whose time period should be last week. Regardless, time period ceased to matter once all the children reached the Rookery and the real story started.

In case you missed it the first two times I said it, I loved this book and I think you all should read it! More professionally, I think other fantasy adventure readers are sure to enjoy it, and it will be an immediate hit with readers looking for something to read once they've run out of Narnia books.


Under the Green Hill is available now, and its sequel Guardian of the Green Hill will be available this fall!


Book source: Review copy provided by the publisher.


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Avalanche Dance

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Schwartz, Ellen. Avalanche Dance. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9679604]

Booktalk:
Gwen has always been a dancer, flitting about through her childhood making up movements. She's always known that she will always be a dancer, but her dream is to become a choreographer. The three-week Dancemakers workshop in the city would give her everything she'd need to realize that dream. But it's expensive and it's far away from the tiny mountain town that she lives in with her family. Her father doesn't want her to go. When their argument about the workshop is cut short by a late spring avalanche, Gwen could lose so much more than her dream to be a choreographer. She could lose the ability to dance, or even walk, at all. And she could lose her father.

Review:
Following the avalanche, Gwen isolates herself entirely. She feels responsible, and she doesn't feel like she can tell anyone. This is partly because she's had a major falling out with her best friend (of forever), Molly, over Molly's new found fascination with alcohol and pot (and yes, these are 13yr olds).

Even though there are some more mature issues brought up in this book, particularly the drinking and substance abuse, Avalanche Dance never lost that tweener feel. Though both girls are dealing with things that they shouldn't have to deal with until they are older (the possible loss of a parent, drug abuse), they both still handle it like the 13 year olds that they are. That said, this is not a book for every 9-12 year old. The parties Molly attends are important to the story and her actions there are described in detail. And her post-Gwen friends are much more hard-core than she is. But more than Molly's actions (which are never portrayed preachily), the way that Gwen links her own actions to her father's injuries might be too much for some younger readers. Knowing very little about avalanches, it was very easy for me to think, like Gwen, that if she hadn't argued with her father, they both would have made it home from their impromptu ski trip just fine.* Clearly the way that Gwen deals with these feelings of guilt is not ideal, but I completely understood why she felt the way that she did. The cause and effect is so much more believable than your average misplaced guilt about a parents’ divorce or something similar.

Told in their alternating viewpoints, Avalanche Dance is really about Gwen and Molly’s relationship to each other. Throughout the book, both Molly and Gwen reflect on the relationship that they used to have, how it fell apart, and how much (if they'd only admit it) they miss it. When Molly is sentenced to community service, to be served at Gwen's house, the two are forced to face each other and their problems. This is the real the meat of the story. Molly can see that Gwen is dying inside and Gwen, though still hurt, is very protective of Molly. Even though their friendship is mostly seen in the girls’ memories, this qualifies as another great girl friendship book. Even when neither wants to talk to the other, I loved the way that they miss and worry about each other.

For the readers who want a book about a dancer:
I always go into fiction books and movies about dancers very warily,** especially those about kids and teens dancing. I'm not delusional enough to think that my experiences as a very committed young dancer are the only experiences that are authentic, but I'm always worried that something will be said or portrayed in a way that will ring so untrue to me that I won't be able to let it go. Things as small as how the ribbons on shoes are tied have ruined what are probably very good stories for me. I braced myself to read Avalanche Dance, waiting as I was reading for something to go wrong. Nothing did. Instead, I was sucked into Gwen's story and Gwen's life.

The way that she dances, with her whole self, and the way she feels about dance, like it is her life force, felt very real to me. They way she grieves over it when she thinks she has to put it aside, also felt heartbreakingly authentic. For example, after Gwen experiences debilitating, but unexplained, pain in her leg, she cuts her hair:

Gwen picked up the scissor. She lifted a hank of hair. Tears rolling down her cheeks, she cut. A clump of hair fell into the sink. She lifted the next piece of hair.

p.57

I remember that feeling from the first time I got my hair cut without explaining to the hairdresser that my hair needed to be able to be gathered into a ponytail with enough left over to attach a hair piece. It was terrifying. It was also a life changing moment for me: I was no longer a dancer. It's the same for Gwen; that haircut is her proof. But Gwen's story does have an uplifting end. And though Molly is eventually the one who saves her, it's dancing that brings her completely back to herself in the end.


Book source: Review copy provided by the publisher through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.


*Disney has taught me, hopefully among other folks, that yelling on the side of a snowy mountain has clear and immediate consequences.

**That new Black Swan movie? It looks awesome and I'm definitely going to see it, but I'll be watching all the dancing scenes through my fingers. I mean, Natalie Portman as a ballerina I can almost accept (she carries herself well), but how will she do the dancing scenes? They're going to use a double, right? And what about Winona Ryder and Mila Kunis?!? The queens of the all-time slouchers? Are they kidding? They couldn't find any ACTUAL dancers who want to make a break into the movie biz? Really?

The Lost Hero - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Riordan, Rick. The Lost Hero. New York: Disney - Hyperion Books for Children, 2010. Print. The Heroes of Olympus 1.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9822197]

Booktalk:
Camp Half-Blood is packed, even in the winter. With the addition of new cabins for all the minor gods' children and everyone being claimed by the time they're 13, there are a ton more Heroes roaming around. But things still aren't going swimmingly. Zeus has closed Olympus and is not allowing the gods to talk to their mortal children. Artemis, even, is cut off from her huntresses. And Percy's missing. No matter where Rachel's predictions send Annabeth looking, she can't find him.

But this story isn't about all that, not really. It's about Piper, Leo and Jason. Three half-bloods with special gifts: Piper can convince anyone to do just about anything, Leo is amazingly good with his hands and can make an engine out of just about anything, and Jason, well, at the moment Jason can't remember anything. They've been hidden away at a school for delinquents, all unclaimed even though they're well beyond 13, but chosen by the gods since birth for what they must do now.

Review:
The Lost Hero totally fulfilled all my wishes and desires for it. It's still Camp Half-Blood (even if Chiron is especially cranky and unhelpful in this go-round), but it's not just more of the same. We're not so far into the future that Percy and Annabeth are former legends, nor are we so close to the end of the last Percy book that we have to sit around and watch them make out all the time. They're not even main characters in this story, just cameo characters. The addition of the children of all the minor gods makes everything a bit more hectic and crowded and crazy, but the explanations of the various gods and their traits are still there. Not only do we get Piper, Leo and Jason as new characters, but there are a bunch of new potentially important folks back at camp as well. And (this is a bit spoilery, so highlight to read) San Francisco was never really evil! But that last one is probably only important to me.

I couldn't have asked for more, and I doubt other fans of the Percy Jackson books could either.

The Lost Hero is told from the perspectives of Piper, Leo and Jason. While they all kind of sound alike (see my criticism of the alternative viewpoints in Riordan's The Red Pyramid), I never got them mixed up during the story. This may be more because of what is going on in each of their heads rather than distinction of voice. Even though they're all on the same quest and living through the same adventures/dangers, they're not remotely going through the same things. Each of their lives really has been leading up to this quest and they're just now starting to figure out how. Piper is going through all kinds of internal torment because she has been basically told that she'll double-cross the other two (not to mention that all her memories of Jason, who she thought was her boyfriend, are probably a product of some super-potent Mist). Leo is seeing his former babysitter Tia Callida (who encouraged playing with both fire and knives) and is figuring out connections between her, the weird circumstances surrounding his mother's death, and the prophecy he, Piper and Jason are meant to be fulfilling. And poor Jason. He's just trying to grasp hold of his memories: the ones that allow him to be a top-notch fighter, the ones that bring the gods' Roman rather than Greek names to his lips, and the ones that rumble in the back of his mind with every mention of the Titan War.

It's a bit more complicated, a bit more multi-layered, and a bit longer than the Percy books. But then, the characters (and the original Percy fans) are also a bit older. New readers will fare just fine without having read the Percy books (so far), but I have a feeling that won't be the case for much longer. And Percy fans will love the continuation of the Camp Half-Blood story.


Also of note: Leo is Latino and Piper is of Cherokee descent. Leo (very) occasionally uses Spanish words, especially in his memories. Piper reflects on her grandfather's life on the reservation as opposed to the life she's lived in California (her dad's a famous actor). She also bristles at the term "Half-Blood" upon reaching camp (though there is no examination or explanation of why that term bothers her in the text). Riordan doesn't make a big deal about the ethnicities of any of the characters (at least not the mortal half of their ethnicity...), but he still manages to make it matter.


Book source: Philly Free Library where I started out 27th in line for this title a week before its release. :)

The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Hahn, Mary Downing. The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall. Boston: Clarion Books, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9790662]

Booktalk:
When Florence's uncle sends for her, taking her from Miss Medleycoate's Home for Orphan Girls and offering her a place in his home, she thinks her life must be finally looking up. When she gets to Crutchfield Hall, she finds her uncle to be wonderful and caring but away a lot on business. She's left with a crotchety aunt who doesn't bother to hide her dislike of Florence, her sickly cousin James who refuses to leave his bed, and the oppressive memory of James' older sister Sophia who died a year earlier. But then Sophia's memory stops just being oppressive; Sophia becomes...persuasive.

Review:
Mary Downing Hahn was the author of my childhood nightmares.

Her books, especially Wait Till Helen Comes, terrified be as a child. The only time in my entire life that my mother limited the content of my reading was to not allow me to read her Hahn's books after dark. As I've admitted before, I scare easily, but Hahn's books scared everyone. I have a distinct memory of my friends Karen and Paige and I reading one of her books out loud at a slumber party. Later that night we were dared to go outside by Paige's sister. That's it, just go outside. We couldn't do it. Paige's sister put all our underwear in the freezer as our "consequence" for turning down the dare. We felt lucky. We were in the sixth grade. I'm pretty sure that stopped my torrid affair with Hahn's book, but I still remember them.

It was with this background that I picked up The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall, expecting to be scared. And I wasn't. It's not that I'm so grown-up now or so desensitized by years of scary books and movies that I hadn't been in late elementary-middle school. I admitted just a couple months ago that I couldn't read The Dead Boys right before bed. It's that Sophia wasn't all that scary. She's mean, but not evil; jealous, but has no power/knowledge to get what she wants. She's just a sad, spoiled girl who doesn't want to be dead and who will hang around grabbing everyone's attention with her antics and tantrums until she gets what she wants: a second chance at life. Because it's just nor fair! Especially when James gets to live. Sophia terrorizes James and tries to get Florence to help (and sometimes succeeds).

But it still wasn't scary.

Because the whole story revolved around Sophia and Florence and James' fear of her, The Ghost of Crutchfield Hall kind of fell apart for me. Younger readers who are not quite ready for the super-scary stuff but are still looking for a Halloween book will be happy with this one.

Readers who aren't expecting Mary Downing Hahn to always remind them why Joey is right to be afraid of little girl ghosts* might be happy with it too.


Book source: Arc picked up at ALA


*I tried to find a clip, but no dice:


Chandler: Joey, there was a little girl who lived here, but she died like 30 years ago.
(Joey's eyes double in size)
Joey: (frightened) What?
Chandler: Ha! I'm just messing with you.
Joey: That's not funny! You know I'm afraid of little girl ghosts!
- from http://www.friendscafe.org/scripts/s10/1014.php

You can also watch the whole episode online, if you want the visual. The scene I'm referencing is at about 17:30. :)

River Odyssey - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Roy, Philip. River Odyssey. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2010. Print. The Submarine Outlaw Series 3.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/10508116]
 
Booktalk:

If Sheba dreamt about you, you were in for it.
"There was a big storm," she began.
I sat up and listened closely. A big storm was no big deal; I had seen lots of those.
"And there was a sea monster."
Not so good. "What did it look like?"
"I couldn't see it; I just knew it was there. And your submarine was sinking."
Shoot! "Was the monster pulling it down?"
"Yes, I think so. I'm not sure. It's just that..."
"What?"
"Well..."
"What? What is it?"
"I think maybe the saw monster was your father."

p.3

Trusting in Sheba's dreams and intuition, Alfred postpones his trip to the Pacific and decides to sail upriver to Montreal. That's where his grandfather thinks his father ran to when he left Alfred, and that's where Alfred is hoping he can still find him. Sheba is worried that without this trip, Alfred will be left with unfinished business weighing him down for the rest of his life. If that's true, why does Alfred feel more pulled down by dread the closer he gets to his destination?
 
Review:
The Submarine Outlaw is growing up, both the character and the series. Though there is still plenty of information about the working of the sub and, in this installment, the workings of the St. Lawrence River, River Odyssey reads a lot less like narrative non-fiction than the previous books in the series. I think that's because Alfred actually does a lot of growing in this book and deals with a lot of (gasp!) feelings. And he finds out that while he may want to explain everything away logically (see his rationale for the weird happenings over what my be Atlantis in the second book) some things, especially the actions of people and the motives behind them, will always remain inexplicable.

Alfred's mother died giving birth to him, and his father left shortly thereafter. All Alfred knows about either is what he's been told by his grandparents. Most recently, when asked the question, "What was he like?", this has consisted of a tight-lipped response from his grandfather: "He's not like you" (27). For the duration of his trip, Alfred is let trying to figure out what that means. He's not adventurous? Not at home on the water? Not good with animals or without company? As Alfred sails up-river and meets a variety of people along the way (as he is wont to do), he settles on another possibility. What if his father is not good?

Still an adventure story, still a great story about how things work, River Odyssey has something else too that was missing from the other Submarine Outlaw books: emotional (rather than mechanical) conflict and growth. Though Alfred still meets, gets to know, and leaves people on his trip, though he still gets in and out of scrapes along the way (gets a whole lot closer to getting caught than we've ever seen before - it's a lot harder to flit off into international waters when you're in a river), gone is the episodic quality of the first two books. I doubt fans of the series will be missing anything that they loved in the first books and will love seeing a glimpse into the rest of Alfred's life. And I think River Odyssey may have more to offer new readers as well. This doesn't feel like fiction for young readers of non-fiction anymore. The story and the information about ships, subs, and bodies of water are much more balanced, and this book is (finally) about a boy who happens to travel the world by sub rather than about a boy and how built, maintains, and travels by submarine.


River Odyssey came out last month and is now available for purchase!
 
 
Book 1: Submarine Outlaw
Book 2: Journey to Atlantis
Book source: Review copy provided by the publisher

Nightshade City - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Wagner, Hilary. Nightshade City. New York: Holiday House, 2010. Print.

[Book cover credit: http://www.librarything.com/work/9209452]

Booktalk:

All eyes were upon the Nightshade brothers. The crowd's faced turned from joyful to bewildered; the rowdy noise turned to deafening silence, then shifted to a low drone of whispers.

The boys heard one rat say, "I saw them in the Combs. I swore they were ghosts!" Others said "Julius lives" or "Nightshade has returned!" The brothers were terrified and exhilarated. Who was their father?

p.53

Vincent and Victor Nightshade have spent most of their lives trying to blend in, just trying to survive. But once upon a time they had a family and a father who was loved by everyone in their community. When they're unexpectedly saved from a dreary and dangerous life in the Combs, they must carry the mantle of their father and save the rats still left in the Combs. Save them and bring them to Nightshade City.

Review:
I LOVED The Rats of NIMH, both book and movie, when I was a kid. When Nightshade City came for me in the mail, I was half really excited about reading a new novel about a secret civilization of intelligent rats and half really really worried that it could never live up to my memory of Mrs. Frisby and her children. Well, I was right on both counts. The secret civilization of intelligent rats is there and, in the same spirit of O'Brien's classic, they are very human little rodents and the descriptions and characterizations of them are simply magic. For example:

Lamenting his large dinner, Lithgo leaned against the wall for support as sweat trickled down his thick russet brow and steam wafted from his now-filthy coat. The two young lieutenants stood without a sound, waiting for the major's orders. All that could be heard in the dusky corridor was Lithgo's weighty breathing.

p.4

Can't you see that scene? You know what kind of major Lithgo is, the overweight, past his prime, spent kind. He's also really evil, but that's not the point of this paragraph. Wagner manages to describe the rats, especially when we first meet them, in a way that reminds you that they're rats but also reminds you that they're "people."

But this is not a novel about a sweet widow and her helpless children or even a society of rats who are fleeing humans. This is a novel about a just civilization of rats that was overthrown in a now legendary Bloody Coup. The bad guys are other rats, and they include a very large albino rat, escaped from some kind of testing facility, who delights in torturing and scaring those over whom he rules. This monster, Billycan, leads an army of orphaned male rats, teaching them to be killing machines and to police their former friends and neighbors before they even reach adulthood.

There are parts of this book that are definitely not for the faint of heart. Teenagers worry that their younger siblings are being tortured on their behalf; powerful leaders try to seduce young and beautiful girls; people (rats) die. Through all of that, Nightshade City and its early inhabitants never lose their resolve that things will turn out alright. Because of them, their normalcy and their senses of humor, the story never gets too scary or harsh. It's just important. What Vincent, Victor and the rest of the rats of Nightshade City are doing is of utmost importance and people will suffer greatly if they don't accomplish what they've set out to do. In this way, and in the way that violence and evil and other scary stuff is used, I think it is along the lines of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. What the characters are doing feels epic and like it will change everything. Maybe it will.

This definitely one of my favorite books read this year, which is something I almost never say. I just LOVED this!


Nightshade City was released earlier this month and is available for purchase!


Book source: Review copy provided by the publisher

Penny Dreadful - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Snyder, Laurel. Penny Dreadful. Drawings by Abigail Halpin. New York: Random House, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9761350]

Booktalk:
After spending most of her life living in a mansion with a tutor and a chef and "approved" friends with impeccable manners and hardly any personality, Penelope wishes, at the wishing well in her backyard of course, for something, anything interesting to happen to her. But interesting is not always as fun as it looks in the books Penelope spends her days reading. When her dad quits his job and her family runs out of money, Penelope quickly makes another, more specific wish. Instead of wishing for anything, she wishes for something to fix the multitude of problems left behind by all the "interesting" going on in her life and suddenly finds herself moving to Thrush Junction in the country, which for Penelope, might as well be a whole new world.

Review:
This is a hard book to summarize because the beginning is so incredibly different from the rest of the book. It all goes together. The difference doesn't cause any jarring shifts for the reader, and circumstances in the opening make the rest of the book make sense, but this is not a book about a little rich girl who moves to the county, as the first couple chapters would have you believe. Yes, Penelope has grown up rich, but finances quickly deteriorate in the Grey household after her father leaves his job. As the whole family figures out how to live without a chef, a housekeeper, or even a steady income, this becomes a book about figuring out what is really important. Houses and furniture can be let go; your family (and your books!) you take with you. Once that family gets to Thrush Junction, however, this becomes a book about finding yourself, making friends, and feeling and helping others to feel welcome. It's about community.

But I didn't think any of this while I was reading. While reading Penny Dreadful, this was just a book about Penelope, who wanted to go out and experience life. She needed to become Penny instead, and in Thrush Junction, she finds just the right people to help her do just that.

Thrush Junction is populated with a bunch of oddballs, many of whom live at Whippoorwillows with the Greys. Penelope, who has never really had friends before, must come out of her shell, and Luella is the perfect girl to drag her out. As Penelope, now Penny, learns how to have and be a friend, Luella introduces her to the rest of their little town. There's Down-Betty who was in vaudeville, Duncan who might be allergic to EVERYTHING and so is barely allowed to eat anything, Kay who runs the town diner, Jasper who is Luella's other best friend, Twent who can't say his r's (and has two moms!), and a whole bunch of other folks. The whole thing reminded me of Because of Winn-Dixie, but with a buried treasure legend instead of a dog. It has a feel-good feeling throughout that is infectious, even though the Greys money worries are a constant hum in the background. Things can be a bit episodic, but that's because that's how summer is sometimes. It's all about the people that come and go and the fun things that you get to do together for one day.

It's great to see so much diversity in the characters. In addition to Twent's two moms, Luella and her family are black, there is a wide range of ages at Whippoorwillows (and not all the old folks are grandparents), non-traditional gender roles within otherwise traditional family units, and a character who is deaf (can't tell you which without a spoiler). And there are no big deals made about any of it. These are all simply people that Penny meets during her adventures in her new town, and it's great to see them represented in literature just because they exist in real life rather than to Teach a Lesson to readers about how Everyone's the Same on the Inside!

I should also add that Penny Dreadful is also peppered with drawings by Abigail Halpin. Rather than distracting from the text, as I often think in-text illustrations do in chapter books, they add to it. My ARC only has preliminary sketches, but from those, I can tell that they're going to be awesomely full of life and emotion. My favorite one is of Penny is straggling behind Luella and Jasper on the sidewalk with the most sour look on her face ever, though the drawing of Twent "wahwing" is a close second. :)


Penny Dreadful comes out in hardback today!


Book source: ARC picked up at ALA.

A Different Day A Different Destiny - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Laing, Annette. A Different Day, A Different Destiny. Statesboro, Georgia: Confusion Press, 2010. Print. Snipesville Chronicles 2.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/10082476/]

Booktalk:
The Professor, doing what she does, manages to drop her modern calculator somewhere in the past. The changes this creates in the past causes changes that reach forward to our present day where it leaves a rift in time and drags Hannah, Brandon, and Alex back in time to right things. Again. Only this time they're all in 1851; Hannah in Scotland, Brandon in England, and Alex back in Snipesville where all their adventures started in the first place.

Review:
Laing has done it again! She's managed to cram a whole lot of information into an entertaining story (with a bit of actual danger thrown in this time) and created a dizzying web of characters connected to each other, the characters in Don't Know Where, Don't Know When, and Hannah, Brandon, and Alex's present day lives. Some of these connections are pretty obvious (the Gordons that Hannah lives with are the grandparents of the Scottish Mr. Gordon from the first book and a young girl in Balesworth who is the spitting image of Verity turns out to be her great-grandma), but that certainly didn't detract from their stories. And most of the connections I didn't see coming until the series of big reveals toward the end. I think that's the most amazing thing about these books for me: how some of the details all work out so seamlessly without being so obvious that I figured them out halfway through the book.

Hannah, Brandon, and Alex thought they had things bad in WWII England, but their experiences in the last book are nothing compared to what each of them goes through in 1851. Alone. In 1851, all three of them are considered adults, expected to earn a wage and take care of themselves. They each have to deal with this realization and figure out how to make their own ways and survive before they can even begin to think about how to find each other and get back home. The way that the book shifts between their stories was very clear and easy to follow. And for anyone (like me) for whom the year 1851 doesn't ring a bell, they are doing this all in the midst of preparations for Prince Albert's Great Exhibition and a growing disapproval across England and Scotland of the lingering institution of slavery in America.

Alex, still in Snipesville, comes face to face with slavery. As he travels to Savannah looking for work (with the help of a modern calculator he found in a cotton field to boost his mathematical skills), he is accompanied by a slave, Jupe, who is about his age. No matter how he tries to treat Jupe as an equal, Jupe never opens up to him or fully trusts him. Alex does manage to keep Jupe with him by lying about who legally owns him, keeping Jupe from being arrested, punished, or sold because he ran away. The situation with Jupe is complicated by the fact that Alex genuinely likes his employer, even though Mr. Thornhill buys and sells slaves in the course of his land sale transactions. This conflict eventually tears at Alex, and he remains upset and a bit broken at the close of the book. The question of how otherwise good people could participate in or even condone slavery is never answered here, which is probably as it should be.

Hannah and Brandon are free from the emotional and intellectual turmoil that Alex must endure in 1851. They're both left in horrible working and conditions by their trip back in time. Brandon "comes to" already in the pitch black dark of a coal mine (which seemed extraordinarily cruel to me) and eventually makes his way back to Balesworth. On the way he lives in a workhouse, becomes a professional mourner, and is, once again, a novelty to those around him. People assume that Brandon is a former slave, especially after he tells people that he was born in America. England, having recently abolished slavery in their own country, is on a crusade to have the same happen in America. Many people, especially the upper class women, want to know Brandon's thoughts on the subject and want to hear all about his experiences. The fact that he has to fabricate these experiences based on what he learned in history classes doesn't seem to bother anyone.

Hannah, of course, has the most tumultuous time. She's forced to be a piecer in a mill, first cotton and then jute, and earns pennies a week. She's fired twice and almost starves to death in between. She has a lot to complain about, but what Hannah is the most worried about is her lack of shopping opportunities. Her attitude is, once again, off-putting for most of the book, which is a shame as her storyline was the one I was the most interested in. At some point during her ordeal, it seems like Hannah may be learning something from the life she's living. She makes friends and finds herself in a family; she agitates for workers' rights (to hang out in the park) and gives an upper class woman who lives off mill profits the scare of her life by walking her through a tenement neighborhood. Still, as soon as she is rescued by the Professor and given a fancy dress and a bit of pocket money, all those hard-learned lessons fall right out of her head. She can't even be polite to a waiter, and why should she? It's his job to serve her. Ugh. I was really happy when the Professor ditched her again and she had to become a house maid.

Even with my disappointment in Hannah's character development, or lack thereof, I really enjoyed A Different Day, A Different Destiny. I also learned a lot about the working class in the British Empire during the Industrial Revolution and British involvement in the American Abolitionist Movement.


Book 1: Don't Know Where, Don't Know When
Book source: Review copy provided by the author. Thanks!

The Kneebone Boy - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Potter, Ellen. The Kneebone Boy. New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9970335]

Booktalk:
Otto (the oldest one with a scarf he never takes off and his own sign language he uses instead of actually talking), Lucia (the middle one who translates for Otto and is generally snarky and in charge), and Max (the youngest one and a bit of a know-it-all) keep pretty much to themselves. Not that they have a choice. Since their mother went missing, everyone in town has been avoiding them. The only person who will have anything to do with them is Mrs. Carnival, who watches them when their dad goes away to paint portraits. It's not great; it's not fun. But the Hardscrabble children are used to it.

Note to the reader: If you ever want your life to turn topsy-turvy, say, "Things will go on just as they always--" Oops, I almost said it.

p.37*

Otto says it, and for a second topsy turvey look like a good thing. They'll be sent to London to stay with their cousin Angela rather than staying with crabby old Mrs. Carnival! But then they arrive in London only to find Angela on holiday. In search of an adventure and unwilling to return to Mrs. Carnival, they head to their secret great-aunt Haddie's where they find more weirdness and mystery than they bargained for.

Review:
This book is not a fantasy; there is no magic. Weird things happen and you think that they MUST be magical/paranormal/fantastical, but there is a rational explanation for all of it. Weird creaky (not squeaky) rats that run on the same path all the time? Taxidermy-ed miniature zebras? A hole in the floor that goes forever? A cat with five legs? All explained. Well, not the cat, but he's the most believable bit to begin with. Still, this is certainly not realistic fiction. It is precocious-kids-left-on-their-own fiction, or rich-people-are-crazy fiction. Lemony-Snicket-type fiction. Let's just call it unrealistic fiction, shall we?

Even though they live with their father, the three Hardscrabble children are pretty used to fending for themselves. Since their mother mysteriously disappeared (and both Otto and their father were suspected of killing her and burying her in the garden), their father has been sad. He's also been taking more portrait clients; former royals who have been kicked off their thrones and who don't often pay their bills. Still, the Hardscrabbles manage.

Adventure upon adventure, the kids all end up in Snoring by the Sea, a small town outside of London, where their secret great-aunt Haddie is staying. They meet a taxidermist who could easily be mistaken for a Viking invasion reenactor, take up lodgings in a castle folly with Haddie, suffer through some ghastly American food (even though Haddie never gets her hands on the "fluff" to make fluff-r-nutters), and hear the local legend of The Kneebone Boy. The local aristocracy, the Kneebones, sent all of their children to grow up in the castle folly, back in the day. That way they adults could do adult things and the kids could do whatever their hearts desired. It also kept the Kneebone children from the oldest child of each generation, the Kneebone Boy, born half-human half-animal. The Kneebone Boy was kept, every generation, locked in a tower in the castle. This is all just legend, of course. But there is something weird going on in the forest surrounding the castle and the castle folly. The Hardscrabbles are certain that the Kneebone Boy is real and that he has escaped, and they're determined not to let him be captured and locked away in his tower again.

Unrealistic fiction has the most awesome and memorable characters, and Otto, Lucia and Max are no exception. They are all precocious, sarcastic, and quick-witted little monsters, constantly attacking each other, but not in a mean way. They're all just too smart for their own good, or at least each is trying to prove to the other two that he or she is the most knowledgeable of group on any given subject (Max usually wins). Lucia, the middle child but still clearly the leader of the group, is used to Otto going along with her, her ideas, and her adventures, especially as she is his translator. She's also still stuck in the thinking that Max is just little. Too little to be of help, too little to be a friend the way that Lucia and Otto are friends, too little to make decisions for the group. Through their adventure, each of the Hardscrabble children gets more of a will of their own, and instead of making them grow up and grow apart, they realize that they not only need each other but truly like each other as well.


The Kneebone Boy comes out in hardback today!


Book source: ARC picked up at ALA.

*Quotes and page counts are from an uncorrected proof and may not match the published copy.

Journey to Atlantis - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:
 
Roy, Philip. Journey to Atlantis. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2009. Print. The Submarine Outlaw Series 2.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9545628]

Booktalk:
With a little help from Alfred's grandfather, Ziegrfried has added extra speed, power, and, of course, safety precautions to the sub. It's a good thing, too, as Alfred will need them all as he crosses the Atlantic in search of the lost city of Atlantis.

Review:
I was worried/excited that Journey to Atlantis would break entirely from the precedent set by the first book in the series and suddenly have mermaids, a city suspended under a bubble on the bottom of the ocean, or other such impossibilities. Worried for readers who were drawn to the first book because of it's realistic tone and wealth of information; excited because Atlantis is pretty cool. Turns out, my worry was unnecessary. Magical creatures don't suddenly pop out of the ocean to take Alfred, Hollie, and Seaweed to their underwater palaces; this book is planted firmly in reality. Still, the ocean is still an unfathomable place, exactly why Alfred wants to be free to explore it, and not everything he encounters during his trip across the ocean can be rationalized or explained away.

Alfred studies quite a bit in preparation for this trip, looking especially at accounts of others' search for the lost city. He also studies at sea navigation, international law for water travel, and modern day piracy (in order to avoid, not to practice). All of this studying happens before the opening of the book (luckily), but the knowledge Alfred acquired over the winter shows throughout the novel and, of course, is shared with the reader. What might be considered an information overload in another series, fits well with the Alfred (and Ziegfried) we were introduced to in the previous book.

During his trip, Alfred meets scholars, sailors, world travelers, and many other people during his travels (yes, including pirates!). Though he continues to be brave and good, sacrificing his time and, in some cases, his safety to help others, this book is more about the exploring that Alfred is finally able to do rather than his adventures in the submarine. The descriptions of the Mediterranean, the western coast of Africa, Azores are amazing. Roy practically paints pictures of these locales, in addition to describing the people Alfred gets to meet. Though the story remains a bit episodic, Journey to Atlantis has a clear goal in mind throughout: find the lost city. Alfred retraces the steps of other explorers, circles sonar abnormalities, and most importantly, lets himself believe that there might be something left of Atlantis to find. His eagerness to continue the search ties all of his other encounters together, making this book flow much more smoothly than the last. I can't wait to see how Roy improves on the next book in the series as well.

Again, my "big" complaint is actually a minor one. After the heroism Alfred showed the previous year exploring his own coastline, his grandma and grandpa decide to support his decision not to be a fisherman, which is great! Grandpa expresses his approval by suddenly showing up at the boathouse one day to help Alfred and Ziegfried work on the sub, and Grandma, well, Grandma does this:

The observation window, in the floor of the bow, was also the same, except that Hollie's beloved blanket, rather frayed at the edges, had been replace by a lovely quilt my grandmother had knitted especially for him.

p.6

Does anyone else see the problem? Probably not. And, no, it's not that you should never replace a dog's blankie because they freak out about it (Hollie whines until he gets his old blanket back). The problem is that you quilt a quilt, or maybe sew it. You knit an afghan. Of course, this little sentence is probably not a problem for very many people, just knitter and quilters, and we're really not the intended audience, so I guess it's okay. :-)

This is a great second book in a series. It takes us beyond the premise of the first book, but does not act  ONLY as a bridge to the third book. No Second Book Syndrome here! The third book in the series, River Odyssey, will take Alfred, Hollie and Seaweed up the St. Lawrence River where Alfred hopes to find not only a sunken ocean-liner but his father. It is available for purchase from the publisher's website!


Book 1: Submarine Outlaw
Book source: Review copy from publisher

The Dead Boys - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Buckingham, Royce. The Dead Boys. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons - Penguin Young Readers Group, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9872472]

Booktalk:
When Teddy moves to the small town of Richland so that his mother can work at the nuclear power plant upstream, he is inexplicably drawn to the abandoned house and HUGE tree next door. But when he wakes up in the middle of the night to find tree branches sneaking through his bedroom window trying to get to him, he realizes the tree is much more dangerous and sinister than he could ever have imagined.

Review:
This book is pretty creepy. For me, the creepiness was compounded by the "about the author," which appears at the beginning of my ARC, telling a bit about Buckingham's childhood in Richland, downstream from a nuclear power plant and with a huge and gnarly sycamore tree in his back yard. If this ends up coming at the end of the published book, I think it'll add a little chill after everything is over and done with. Because I read it at the beginning, I kept thinking, "This is a real place!" even if the things happening in it are clearly fiction.

Warped by toxic nuclear waste that was dumped into the river during the Manhattan project, the tree next to Teddy's house has decided that it no longer likes to draw it's energy from the sun and the water. It likes to suck energy from twelve-year-old boys. And it's been doing just that for decades. Teddy, new to town, is looking to meet new friends and runs into a few of the trees past victims. At first these boys seem a bit odd to him, but not so out of place that he doubts their existence. The bell bottoms and "wiseacre" sayings were a big tip-off to me that these kids were visiting from the past, but middle grade readers might, like Teddy, just think he's moved into a tiny town in the middle of nowhere and so a little behind the times.

Teddy is slow to figure out what is really going on, but not so slow that I wanted to shake him. Near misses with the tree also kept the suspense at a high, distracting me from Teddy's sometimes sluggish sleuthing. By the time he gets it all sorted out, Teddy is either going to be the tree's next victim or the tree's downfall. In trying to save himself, he has to decide if he wants to/can also save the boys who have been trying to help the tree, the only kids he's met at all in Richland.

Again, this was a creepy book. Those chapters about the tree breaking in to Teddy's window while he's sleeping are best not read right before bed. Surprising choices about loyalty and doing what is right verses doing what is best for you right now make The Dead Boys a slightly more substantial read than your average horror book.


The Dead Boys comes out this Thursday!


Book source: ARC picked up at ALA

Submarine Outlaw - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Roy, Philip. Submarine Outlaw. Vancouver: Ronsdale Press, 2008. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/5509071]

Booktalk:
Alfred lives with his grandparents in Dark Cove, a small town in Newfoundland. All the men of Dark Cove are fishermen, and it looks as though this will be Alfred's destiny as well. But to be a fisherman, looking out at the sea from the relative safeness of a fishing boat, never straying far from the coastline and certainly never going into the water (most of the fishermen cannot swim even though they spend most of their lives on the water), would kill Alfred. He wants to be an explorer and he wants to explore the depths of the sea. This is where Ziegfried comes in. This intimidatingly large and gruff owner of a junkyard happens to be a mechanical genius. He agrees to help Alfred build a submarine for one, allowing Alfred to escape his grandfather's fishy wishes for him pursue fishy dreams of his own.

Review:
Okay, guys, I'll admit it. I was worried about this one. Realistic fiction about a kid who, with the help of a junkyard maven, turns an oil tank into a working submarine? I'm all for fantasy, but huge suspensions of disbelief in a story that is supposed to be realistic, of the kind I thought I was going to have to make right there in the first chapter, are not my forte. But then Ziegfried started, matter of factly, building a submarine out of an oil tank. There are almost 80 pages of the building and testing of this submarine, a lot for a 250 page book. It makes for a slow start to the story, but not a slow start for the book. Ziegfried explains everything he's doing as he goes along, ostensibly so that Alfred will be able to handle minor repairs on his own at sea, but really so that we readers will not have to make that huge jump on our own. It's so interesting to read about all the ways he's making sure things float and sink when you want them too, and it is, to my limited mechanical knowledge, pretty realistic.

Once the submarine is built, Alfred is off! Along the way he picks up a seagull and a dog, meets a lady who lives alone on an island save her own menagerie of furry and feathered companions, rescues a family at sea, finds some treasure, and gets chased by the coastguard, navy, and excited locals. He gets to have the adventure that being a fisherman would have denied him. Looking back, the whole thing is a bit episodic, but while reading, the story is not the least disjointed. The connecting theme is Alfred's realization that the actions of his 14 year old self in his little tiny submarine have consequences, good and bad. Over the course of the novel he learns how to weigh his choices before rushing into a decision, who to trust to help him, and that other people (and a bird and a dog) are counting on him. Basically, during his year at sea, he grows up.

Did I mention that Alfred is 14? The book opens shortly before his 13th birthday, there is a year of simultaneously going to school and building the submarine, and then a year at sea, coming home just before everything freezes. In the beginning, Alfred was a believable 12 year old, and it is clear that the intended audience for this book is also. By the end, he seems a bit older and wiser than 14 at times. I have no doubt, however, that the following books will keep the tweener feel, even as Alfred continues to age and mature.

Also, it's easy to forget that Alfred's still a teenager when he's not going to school. His grandfather was going to make him drop out of school to become a fisherman at 14 anyway, but I wish that there was an option for his life that allowed him to stay in school. Instead, when it is suggested that he return to school, the argument is made that "I was already a man, no longer a boy. What I was learning no school could teach" (219). Until that line, dropping out of school was kind of a side consequence of growing up in Dark Cove, not of being an explorer, and a consequence that was easily forgotten. I wish the author had let me forget it if the issue wasn't actually going to be resolved or changed. Still, this is a small complaint about a book that I really did like reading. The descriptions of how the submarine worked as well as the life at sea and along the coast of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia were incredibly interesting and often beautiful. This series will be a hit with readers interested in oceanography, treasure-hunting (but not pirates), and the general way things work. I can't wait to read about Alfred's next adventure, which will take him a bit farther from home and the relative safety of the coast.


If you need another reason to read this book, the paper it is printed on is made of 100% post-consumer waste! It doesn't really have anything to do with the story, clearly, but it's definitely a practice that should be applauded!


I'll be reading and reviewing the second book in this series, Journey to Atlantis, in the next couple of weeks. The third book in the series, River Odyssey will be available from the publisher's website in September and at amazon shortly thereafter!


Book source: Review copy from publisher

Touch Blue - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:


Lord, Cynthia. Touch Blue. New York: Scholastic Press, 2010. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9923239]

Booktalk:
Losing a best friend can feel like losing the whole world, even though you're not. But when Tess's best friend Amy moves off the tiny island they called home Tess and the rest of the kids on the island really do almost lose it all. Without Amy and her four siblings, the state of Maine cannot justify keeping the island school open and Tess's mom employed as the teacher. With no school and no job for her mother, Tess, her little sister Libby, and their parents will have to move to the mainland. Then the Reverend comes up with a plan to save the school: bring five foster kids to the island, enough to keep the school open. So Tess's family, along with a few others on the island, makes room in their home and their lives for a foster child, Aaron. He'll get a home with a real family, and they'll get to stay on the island. The island families will be getting what they want and helping others in the process, and there's no rule against that, is there?

Review:
Tess certainly has a lot of worries. Not only has her best friend leaving left her without a companion all summer (and we won't even talk about how Amy's letters to Tess have become less and less frequent), but it could cause her to lose her whole life as she knows it. And Tess cannot have that. She's happy on the island, loves being able to see the ocean all around her. She loves going lobstering with her father all summer long, and she loves going to school in a one-room schoolhouse with every other kid on the island. Losing all of that to move to a landlocked town where all the kids already know each other and don't need a lobster girl for a friend would be devastating.

Tess is all for the plan to save the school and is excited to have a foster kid stay with her family. She has read plenty of books about foster kids (apparently the state cannot afford to keep a one-room schoolhouse on this island, but a well-stocked library is no problem). In her mind, Aaron is the 12 year old boy version of Anne of Green Gables and she cannot wait to have a bosom friend again to run around the island with. As Aaron spends more time on the island, Tess has to admit that he is more Gilly Hopkins than Anne. Then, finally, she realizes that he isn't a character from a book (ha), but a kid who misses the life he left behind just as much as she would miss her island if she had to leave it.

Aaron and the other foster kids try to settle into life on the island, and Tess, her family, and the rest of the island start to accept the foster kids as their own. And somewhere along the way Aaron and Tess become friends. For so much of the book, Tess is grasping at straws with Aaron, afraid to offend him or trying to shield him from other people on the island, and Aaron is so stand-off-ish and hesitant to let Tess or her family in. Then they finally share a secret. He lets his guard down a little and she starts treating him like any other friend. I wanted SO BADLY for things to work out for them, even as I thought that their secret plan to make things right was a horrible idea. Lord has managed to create two compelling characters in a small amount of time, and she does it through, really, a series of tiffs and misunderstandings. The fact that these normal kids are in this bizarre situation where Tess's continued happiness requires that Aaron not attain what he dreams to be his (being reunited with his family and mainland life) makes it all the more interesting and complicated.

Still, in the end Touch Blue ends up being a sweet story about two kids dealing with BIG things like adults that let you down and situations that are beyond anyone's control. But it's also about lobsters, good luck charms, and a five year old sister who always wants to play Monopoly.


Touch Blue was released August 1st and is now available for purchase!


Book source: Picked up at ALA

Don't Know Where Don't Know When for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is: 


Laing, Annette. Don't Know Where Don't Know When. Statesboro, Georgia: Confusion Press, 2007. Print. Snipesville Chronicles 1.
[Book cover credit: Provided by the author. Thanks!]

Booktalk:
When Hannah and Alex are so rudely torn from their happy lives in San Francisco to move to the middle of nowhere Georgia, Hannah expects her entire life to turn into one huge snooze-fest. They're both forced to go to summer camp at Snipesville State College, where Alex manages to make a friend and Hannah manages to find a Starbucks instead of her camp. When Alex and his new friend Brandon spot Hannah ditching, they decide to join her, and they all end up heading to the library. After finding an WWII identity card in a book and having a weird encounter with a professor, all three decide to head back to the Starbucks. Only when they leave the library, they're no longer in Snipesville and Starbucks hasn't yet been invented.

Review:
I'll admit, the opening of this book was a little slow for me. All the time spent with Hannah and Alex before they go back in time (and before they even get to Georgia), didn't really do anything for me. BUT, if you stick it out through Hannah's whining about how unfair her life is (actually, this continues throughout the book), they'll meet up with Brandon and end up in WWII England where things get very cool. In WWII England, Hannah, Alex and Brandon are all evacuees for the London, sent to the English countryside to escape the Blitz (exactly like the Pevensies in The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe!). Hannah and Alex are taken in by an almost welcoming couple. Brandon, who is black, is taken back to London. Though black children were also evacuated during the bombings of London, it was much harder to find people to take them in. Also, black people weren't all that common in England during this time, so Brandon spends the entire book being kind of a novelty. Hannah and Alex are left to get used to the British countryside during the war and desperately try to find out what happened to Brandon in a society that doesn't tell unpleasant things to children. Meanwhile, Brandon runs away from the man who took him back to London and is presumed dead after a bombing.

But he's not dead; he's really in WWI England. He's even in the same town as Hannah and Alex, just 25 years earlier! Brandon manages to find friendly people (with some help) and even a job, but being black is a much rarer thing in 1915 than it was in 1940. And the attitudes toward black people weren't all that great either. In her acknowledgments, Laing states that the past is not particularly politically correct, which is true, and neither is her portrayal of it. The scenes set both in 1915 and in 1940 are rich in historical detail, including the attitudes of the people in them. While Alex seems to go along pretty fine throughout the story, Hannah is constantly bristled by the treatment of children (what she considers a beating, everyone else considers a well-deserved spanking) and Brandon is constantly affected by peoples reactions to him as a "colored" young man. Though Brandon makes it through his time traveling experience suffering from nothing more than hateful words, the black people he meets both during The Great War (WWI) and WWII do not fare as well.

I managed to get completely caught up in this book. There is a story inside a story that needs solving in order for Hannah, Alex and Brandon to make it back to 21st century Georgia, and though they don't understand how or why, it is connected to their present day lives. Also, given that he's in the same town, Brandon's experiences in 1915 England have some really close ties to the people he, Hannah and Alex meet in WWII England. There were so many ways that all of these connections and different-name-same-person instances could have been screwed up or over simplified, but Laing manages to make them all make sense and even manages to make some of them surprising. My only disappointment in this area was Peggy, and it totally wasn't Laing's fault. I simply wanted 1915 Peggy to grow up to be a different person, but not everyone can live up to their full potential (I'm still angry about who she grew up to be, but I don't want to ruin the surprise).

In short, this is a great time travel book. I wasn't so caught up in the logistics of the time traveling that I lost the ability to be caught up in the times where they ended up. It's also a great look at the day-to-day lives of some of the people left behind in England during the fighting of each world war.


Now, about the cover: If you see slightly older reviews of this book around the blogosphere, or even look this book up on amazon (librarything, goodreads, etc.) it has a different cover where the kids are not in silhouette. While I would usually be all for actual kids rather than kid-shaped shadows, especially when one of the main characters is a POC, I really don't like the old cover. It is, to be honest, why it's taken me two months to get around to reading and reviewing this book. The older cover is on the copy I received. It looks so much more like a history book than a time travel history book, and we all know there is a HUGE difference between the two. While Don't Know Where has the potential to be about kids sent to the past to learn all about it, most likely in a school-type setting, that's not what this book ends up being. But that is what the old cover portrays. I don't know why, but the new cover art for the second printing, in addition to matching the cover art on the sequel, gives it more of an adventure or fantasy feel to me. Kid-shaped shadows are a bit cartoon-y, I guess, and apparently that's what I need in order to feel like I haven't been "assigned" a book specifically to learn from it.

And, yes, I've always been a huge fan of historical fiction but hated studying history. How did you know? :)


Book source: Review copy provided by the author. Thanks Annette!

Because of Winn-Dixie

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

DiCamillo, Kate. Because of Winn-Dixie. Cambridge, Mass.: Candlewick Press, 2000. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/1577]

Awards:
BCCB Blue Ribbon Book (2000)
New York Time Notable Books - Children's Books (2000)
Parents' Choice Awards - Fiction (2000)
School Library Journal Best Books (2000)
ALA Notable Children's Book (2001)
Josette Frank Award (2001)
Newberry Honor (2001)
SEBA Book Award - Children's (2001)
As well as a slew of state awards and a mention in 1001 Children's Books You Must Read Before You Grow Up

Booktalk:

My daddy is a good preacher and a nice man, but sometimes it's hard for me to think about him as my daddy, because he spends so much time preaching or thinking about preaching or getting ready to preach. And so, in my mind, I think of him as "the preacher."

p.13

Opal knows her daddy, the preacher, loves her, but she also knows his new church is the reason she's spending a lonely summer in a new town. Until the preacher sends her out for a box of mac n'cheese. When she gets to the Winn-Dixie, she finds the happiest dog she's ever seen frolicking and wreaking havoc in the produce section. To keep that happy dog from the pound, Opal gives him the only name she can think of in a hurry, Winn-Dixie, and takes him on home. With a dog who has a tendency to smile so big that it makes him sneeze, Opal has the courage to talk to people, including the preacher, and make some new friends.

Review:
Oh, Winn-Dixie. Anyone who's ever had a really friendly dog, especially a really friendly ugly mutt, will tell you that every outlandish and wonderful thing that happens in the book is totally possible. Well, maybe not, but having a good dog is great and Winn-Dixie is just who Opal needs to kick-start her new life in a new town. The preacher is too busy with his new church to be Opal's best friend until school starts in the fall, and Opal's mother is gone and has been for a while. The preacher doesn't like to talk about her or why she left. But once she has Winn-Dixie, Opal isn't alone anymore. She tries out her ideas on him, tells him what she wants, and pours out her heart to him in ways she probably couldn't with another human being, and Winn-Dixie just gives her his goofy smile and unconditional adoration in the way that good dogs will do. It gives her the courage to talk to the guy at the pet store (Winn-Dixie does need a collar), the woman at the library (who thinks Winn-Dixie is a bear at first glance), the town "witch" (whose yard Winn-Dixie runs into in search of peanut butter), and various kids from her daddy's church who are drawn to Winn-Dixie or make fun of her about him. And Winn-Dixie gives Opal the courage to talk to the preacher about her mother. When Winn-Dixie is done working his magic, Opal has a whole cadre of people who love her.

I wouldn't say that religion plays a huge role in Because of Winn-Dixie, at least not explicitly. Opal uses tenets of what her father teaches her both to her advantage and as goals to work towards. She gets to keep Winn-Dixie because he is "an unfortunate," and Christians are supposed to help the unfortunate. On the other hand, she has to be nice to pinch-faced Amanda because she not only goes to the preacher's church, but because something very sad happened to her in the past. And the preacher prays for a mouse that Winn-Dixie catches in the middle of his sermon but does not kill. :) Even though religion does not really factor into the storyline, this book is just as much about how Opal's relationship with the preacher changes as it is about a little girl and her dog. At the beginning of the book, in addition to calling her father "the preacher" in her head, Opal likens him to a turtle. He pulls his head back in his shell when things get hard to protect himself from everything, even his daughter. He's able to do that precisely because he spends so much time "preaching or thinking about preaching or getting ready to preach" (13). Throughout the course of the book, and with Winn-Dixie's help of course, the preacher learns not to shut out Opal but instead to open up to her.

Overall this is a sweet book. There's not a lot of action, but there is a lot of storytelling as Opal gets to know all of her new friends. It can be episodic at times, but it all comes together in the end.


Book source: Holy Spirit Library at Cabrini College
Thanks to Charlotte for reminding me about this book!


For folks who refuse to read dog books: This isn't Old Yeller. There are some tough moments, but nothing compared to classic "dog stories" or, you know, The Knife of Never Letting Go.

Stolen - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Velde, Vivian Vande. Stolen. Marshall Cavendish, 2008. Print.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/5839124]

Awards:
South Carolina Junior Book Award Nominee (2010-2011)

Booktalk:

The simplest way to begin is to start at the ending: The girl's name was Isabelle.

This is the simplest way because in the beginning she had no name -- she was a girl with no name running through a forest she didn't know, for a reason she couldn't remember. She didn't know if she was running away from something or to something or for the simple joy of running

p.10

When Isabelle is chased into a tree by a pack of dogs, she realizes she probably is running from something; she just has no idea what that something is. She's brought into the village and told that she's probably running from the old witch in the woods. A baby was just stolen by the witch, so maybe, just maybe, the witch released the girl she stole six years ago. Her name was Isabelle.
 
Review:
Let me start off by saying that this book is never as spooky as the cover would suggest. There may be an old witch, and there is certainly rampant speculation about said witch and what she might do out there all alone in the forest, but this book isn't about her. It's about Isabelle. Also, there is someone a lot more scary than a witch, but that person is scary in a much different way than what the cover advertises. This person inspires a slow build of scary rather than a jump out and grab you scary. I say this because I certainly wouldn't have picked this book up when I was in late elementary/early middle school (I was kind of a wimp), but I probably would have really loved the story inside.
 
The girl who might be Isabelle gets thrown into a lot of drama, right from the get-go. She's bitten by a hunting dog that is looking for a witch. When she begins to recover from that, she has to tell the family that took her in that she remembers nothing about her own life. Just when she starts to come to terms with that, the folks who might be her family come to claim her. The newly stolen baby was their daughter as well. Their joy at having Isabelle back is tempered by worry about the baby. There is so much pain in this family; Isabelle wants to be their missing daughter, if only to allow them to avoid the pain of losing a daughter all over again. Then Isabelle meets Honey, possibly her older sister, and she can tell that whether Isabelle is the "real" Isabelle or not, Honey wants her family to have nothing to do with her.

Isabelle has some memory; she knows how to spin wool and she knows she was never a princess, for example. She can still navigate the world she's found herself in, even if she has no idea what her place is in it. Maybe because, at least in her head, she has no history with the people around her, she sees things about them that the rest of the village may not. She feels sorry for the mother and father (hers?) who have love two daughters to the witch, but she can see, where others do not, that this desperation to have Isabelle back isn't just the grasping hope of grieving parents. She can see that the rich aunt after whom Isabelle was named is lonely and desperate to have her namesake back. She sees that Honey isn't just suspicious of her, never believing her to be the true Isabelle, but that she doesn't believe that the "real" Isabelle is capable of coming back at all. And she sees that Avis, the woman who initially took her in, doesn't trust the lot of them. These insights don't always seem to help Isabelle figure things out as quickly as she should, but they are more interesting than simple, wide-eyed wonder at that is new around her.

There's a lot of intrigue in this little village that Isabelle must decipher if she's going to figure out who she really is. When it does finally come back to her, it all comes back in a rush (I mean for her. The writing isn't rushed). The ending is unbelievably clever. I had to rush back and reread the prologue to make sure it all fits together, because it is certainly not what I was expecting. It's awesome; I highly recommend it.


Book source: Philly Free Library

The Red Pyramid - for Tween Tuesday

Tween Tuesday was started over at Green Bean Teen Queen as away to highlight awesome books for the 9-12 yr olds or Tweens. Any book highlighted on Tween Tuesday also counts for the In the Middle Reading Challenge! This week's book is:

Riordan, Rick. The Red Pyramid. New York: Disney - Hyperion Books, 2010. Print. The Kane Chronicles 1.
[Book cover credit: librarything.com/work/9277689]

Booktalk:
Carter and Sadie don't see each other often. When their mother died, their mother's parents were granted custody of Sadie, and Carter went with their father. Everywhere. Dr. Julius Kane, Sadie and Carter's father, is an Egyptologist who travels the world doing research and giving lectures. Living with him, Carter has had experiences other kids can only dream about. He's also missed out on some "normal" kid stuff, like learning that it's not cool, or even okay, to wear loafers. Sadie, on the other hand, has had her fill of normalcy and is dying (her hair at least) for a little excitement. When something goes horribly wrong during Carter and their father's annual visit with Sadie, Carter and Sadie must learn to work together and trust each other, an uncle they never knew they had, and a cat in order to save their father from Set, the Egyptian god of the desert. Oh, and the world. They have to save that too.

Review:
Rick Riordan has done it again! He's taken kids who could be normal, personality-wise if not in circumstance this time, linked them up with a deity and set them loose. This time, the kids are not children of gods, but the children of former members of a society (of magicians!) dating back to the time of the Pharaohs that is dedicated to serving/controlling the gods of Egypt. Carter and Sadie are more powerful than most because of their lineage, but there is a Harry Potter-esque it-could-be-anyone thing going on that will open up the rest of the series for a lot of interesting sidekicks. At this point in the series there are only a few kids still training in this society, one of whom is already set up as the girl Carter will embarrassingly and awkwardly crush on for probably the rest of the series, but I'm sure Riordan will bring in a whole cast of interesting kids by the end.

The whole story is told from both Sadie and Carter's points of view in, more or less, alternating chapters. I really liked getting to see the story unfold through both of their eyes. The changing point of view didn't bog down the story, really, since everything was still told in sequence with little to no instances of both characters covering the same event. I did wish, however, that their was a bit more of a difference between their voices. When they're actually talking, there is plenty of difference between proper, nerdy Carter and punky, spunky Sadie, but when they're narrating they're not all that different. Every once in a while Sadie, as narrator, gets riled up about something and it's really clear that she's the one telling the story (the name of the narrator is on every page to help with that as well), but for the most part both of them just sound like Riordan.

Something that is mentioned on multiple occasions but is far from a focal point of the story is that Sadie and Carter's father is black and their mother was white. Both of the kids are biracial, but neither of them looks it. They have that mini-me thing going on with their parents: Sadie looks astonishingly like her mother and Carter looks just like his dad. In the beginning of the book, Sadie talks about how, without her mother there, people question her relationship to Carter and their father because she's so clearly white and they so clearly aren't. She talks about how annoying it is, on the few days a year that they get to spend together, that people question whether or not she belongs in her family. This is, of course, complicated because she doesn't feel like she belongs due to the very limited amount of time they are actually on the same continent. Also near the beginning, Carter expresses his envy of Sadie's normal life with their grandparents. He feels hurt and rejected because his grandparents fought so hard for Sadie and not for him. While I was reading, I wondered about that; why did their grandparents only fight for the grandchild that looks like them? There is a magically influences reason for why they only went to court for custody of Sadie, but I didn't feel like Carter really processed that information when he found out. Maybe because he wasn't thinking about it in the same way that I was, he didn't need the cathartic breakthrough that I was looking for. It was enough, for him, to know that without magical influence his grandparents may have fought just as hard to hold on to their grandson as they did their granddaughter. This is all balanced out by Sadie's feelings of abandonment because she was left with their grandparents rather than being allowed on the road with Carter and their dad, so maybe I'm reading too much into the situation.

Family issues aside (and I'm paying more attention to them here than was paid in the book), I love that Carter and Sadie's race was a non-issue. I do wish that both of them had been presented as biracial characters, or that they even saw themselves that way, rather than one white and one black, but I'm glad that this did not pick up elements of a "problem novel" about a biracial family. It is simply a fantasy book with biracial main characters!


Book source: Philly Free Library