Rebecca's Book Reviews
Book of a Thousand Days
by Shannon HaleBloomsbury 2007
The first book Shannon Hale wrote was an adaptation of an obscure fairy tale. I felt pretty proud of myself that I'd actually read the original "Goose Girl" in one of Lang's fairy books before seeing Shannon Hale's adaptation. Hale is at it again, taking an obscure fairy tale and bringing it to life. This time it's a story from the Brothers Grimm that I have never heard of, and Hale puts a nice touch on it by setting it in Mongolia.
In spite of the hefty suspension of disbelief the book required, I was turning pages all the way through, just desperate to know what was going to happen next. The diary format worked very well. The relationship between the two girls, the lady and her maid, was just perfect. Both were excellent characters, so well done, they kept me reading because I cared very much about what happened to them. I also enjoy the way Hale handles her elements of fantasy, weaving them out of folklore in a way that is original but feels very right.
It is good to have such a storyteller among us to wake
the old tales, give voice to the ancient songs, and
throw in a few new verses of her own. Well done once
again, Shannon Hale
After I read the first page of Uprising I shut the book with a snap
and jumped up from my seat with a cheer. "Hooray! She's done it! I knew
she would! This is it! Haddix has finally written her Newbery book!" After
twelve years and twenty-one novels, Haddix had finally produced a very
likely winner!
I'll be on the edge of my seat until the awards are announced next year.
I knew she had it in her. I spotted Running Out of Time
at the book store when it first
came out in 1995. I usually don't buy unfamiliar books out of the shop. I
prefer to check a book out from the library and read it first, especially
if the book is written by a new author. But something about Running Out of
Time caught my interest. The plot sounded intriguing. I almost bought it.
In the end, I put it back on the shelf, but I
got it from the library the next day.
I have been enjoying Haddix books ever since. It surprised me that
Among the Hidden did not get a Newbery Honor at least. Perhaps the
old bias against science fiction had kept it off the list, but I think that
Among the Hidden is a very important book. I hope they have
my children read Among the Hidden in school,
instead of 1984 and Brave
New World, both of which
I read and hated in High School. I think Among the
Hidden is more relevant as social science fiction,
because the scenario seems far more
plausable and possible in the near future. It was also more fun to read.
Uprising is another very important book. It changed my view of
the world, and I loved every minute of it. It tells the story of the 1911
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory
fire through the eyes of three young women.
I loved Bella the most, the poor immigrant
girl willing to come to a strange land and put up with abuses she could
never have imagined in order to send some money home to her impoverished
family. I often laugh out loud when I read a book, but I seldom cry. I
wept for Bella, sobbed right out loud. This book moved me because of her.
Yetta, the young visionary social activist who walks the picket
line for
months, both inspired and frustrated me. As much as I wished she would
get off her high horse, get over her obsession, and enjoy life a little
now and then, she also made me want to give up writing
my silly fantasy novels and write something that would fight evil instead.
Something more like Uprising.
The third character, Jane, worked very well
at first, but later in the book I found I just couldn't believe that she
would run away from her wealthy father and her life of socially elite boredom
to live in a tenement and work as a governess. Not that I am any authority
on how to convince the audience that one of your characters is capable of
doing something so crazy. Real people do crazy things all the time, but there
was something in the way that Jane's actions were justified to the audience
that smacked of making excuses. All I can say was that having rich girl
Jane there
was an interesting touch, but it didn't quite work. Jane had ceased being
real for me by the end of the book.
As for my initial prediction about the Newbery Award,
I have to make a correction.
This book is for young teenagers, and so it will probably be up for the Printz
Award instead of the Newbery. If I were on the committee, it would have my
vote. This is the most significant contribution to literature for young
people that I have read in a long time. I hope that they have my children
read Uprising in school, instead of The Jungle. I'm handing
it over to my daughter this afternoon.
< a href="#top">Top of Page My husband the college professor dropped this book in my lap with the
following introduction, "I've had this book in my office for a long time, I
never finished it, I've renewed it as many times as I can at the library
and I have to turn it in on Thursday.
It's about this
professor who enrolled as a freshman to do a study on college life."
I picked the book up at once. The main character of the novel I've been
trying to write since my freshman year of college is a college freshman!
This book, I thought, would be perfect for my research!
I began the book hoping for some real-life details I could use to
develop character and setting in my own work. Instead, I made a journey of
personal discovery. Even though my freshman year was nearly sixteen years
ago, the scenario Ms. Nathan describes was uncannily familiar, from the
hectic "Welcome Week" activities to getting busted by the RA for breaking
some rule I didn't know existed.
Some things have changed about living in the dorms. None of my floor mates
brought their own computer, microwave, television and VCR. But the social
interactions were surprisingly similar. I'm sure I was just as disappointing
to the international students as were the American students described by the
international students interviewed
in Ms. Nathan's book. I remember a Japanese
student who lived in a single room at the end of my dorm hall.
I was aware of her
but made no move to befriend her. At the end of her
one semester studying in the United States she went around to all the dorm
rooms and gave out little presents. She gave me a bag of Japanese rice
crackers. I was perfectly baffled by this act of kindness.
It must just be a cultural thing, I thought, and went on with my homework.
I wish
I had been more aware of her need for friendship.
If you thought cliques were bad in high school, welcome to college! Nathan
never speaks of them as cliques, but calls them social networks
or sub-cultures. She points out their homogeneity in a community that is
supposed to embrace diversity. I
fell prey to this myself, mostly hanging out with the intellectuals, students
who were in the cafeteria at seven thirty so they could eat
before eight o'clock classes and would engage in quasi-philosophical
discussions with me over their marshmallow cereal. It was only after college
that I discovered that other sorts of people have real value in society,
and that I could make friends with them. Maybe if I had read this book
in college it would have challenged me to make more of my college experience.
Then again, when did I ever have time to read books like this in college???
I truly enjoyed reading this book. I recommend it to anyone who has been a
college student, who works with college students, or who has a child going
to college. Be warned, Ms. Nathan has no qualms about accurately reporting
foul language used by her classmates, among other activities, but the focus
of the book was not on such things. It was a book examining how children
in our culture become adults throught the rite of passage we call the
freshman year.
This is a great little book.
I love Linda Sue Park. She does her homework! What she doesn't already
know about, she finds out about before she writes about it. She already
knows about being a Korean American, and she handles this subject deftly
and naturally, as only someone who has really been there can do. She didn't
know about silk worms, so she recruited family members to raise two
different batches. Hence the loving detail with which she describes the life
of the silk worms through the eyes of her main character.
This would be a great book for a middle school English class. It's a
school story, a friendship story, it deals well
with issues of racial prejudice, and brings up questions on
animal rights and environmentalism. There's plenty of fodder for good
discussion here.
My favorite, favorite part, though, were the clever asides between
chapters when the author records conversations she had with her main
character in the course of writing the book. As
a writer whose characters follow her to the grocery store and pester her
while she is doing her housework, I am comforted to know that if I really
am insane,
at least one other writer I admire and respect is insane in the same way.
So I hope to make Linda Sue Park fans out of all of you. I hope you'll
read all her books. Project Mulberry is a good place to start.
The book Chasing Vermeer begins with a page of pentominoes.
Pentominoes, the writer explains, are a set of twelve shapes made up of five
squares each. They are supposed to fit together somehow to make a rectangle.
With the pentominoes laid out separately on the page, I could not
imagine how to fit them together to make anything as tidy as a rectangle.
I took Baillett's word for it and turned the page.
The pentominoes page turned out to be a very appropriate introduction.
Chasing Vermeer has several elements that, taken separately, sound
like they would fit together to make a spectacular book. There's a mysterious letter, an
art theft, a girl who wants to be a writer and a boy who likes puzzles,
codes, and pentominoes. These kids have one of those fun
teachers who cares more about learning than sticking to the curriculum. The
setting is a real school in Chicago where the author has actually taught,
and she lets you
know it with her detailed visual descriptions of the buildings. In the
book the reader finds some interesting discussions on art, truth,
coincidence, and the supernatural. I learned a lot by reading it, and I
can now spot a Vermeer on the wall without looking at the little tag
next to the
painting. The story is complex and I can tell
a lot of thought went into the book. However, somehow it just didn't come
together for me.
I had two main complaints. First of all, I stopped believing in the
lead characters somewhere after the first fifty pages. The adults in the
book were all pretty good. I liked the old neighbor lady, and the teacher
character was great, and most of the other adults in the book behaved like
reasonable beings. Unfortunately, after a certain point,
the two kids just weren't reacting
like real eleven year old kids anymore.
My other complaint was the pacing. It was just a little slow
for a children's book, and I really had to push myself to get through
the middle. I found the discussions on art and truth to be more
preachy than provocative. Furthermore,
One of the characters communicates with a pen
pal in code, and even though the key is in the text
I really didn't feel like stopping to translate
a cipher in the middle of reading a book. The writer always
hints at the contents of each
letter further down the page, but I still felt a little left out.
I found the action climax exciting but a little bit confusing.
I did enjoy
the way that about half of the "clues" and suspicious characters
turned out to be red herrings. I did not
enjoy the writer pointing out all the coincidences she'd packed into the
book, coincidences that almost seemed too irrelevant to mention.
But this is a first book! I congratulate Baillett on getting published,
winning lots of awards, and making a decent amount of money for herself,
her agent,
and her
publishing company. Someone will have to tell me if the sequel is an
improvement.
-RJC
by Shannon Hale
Reading a book about living out fantasies by Shannon Hale was a surreal
experience for me. I discovered Shannon Hale some years ago by reading
her first novel,Goose Girl. After reading the book I went to visit
the author's web site and discovered that, as I had suspected, Shannon Hale
was a young mother who wrote YA fantasy novels and got published!!!
She was my own personal fantasy staring me in the face. What could I do? I
became a fan. After my husband and I read her Princess Academy we both
held our breath waiting for the Newbury Awards that year, then cheered and
wrote Shannon Hale a congratulatory e-mail on her Newbury Honor Medal. Oh,
she was living my personal fantasy, all right.
Something else I discovered when I visited Shannon Hale's web site: she's
funny. Really funny. She has this hilarious satirical edge, surprising me
into laughing out loud at her unexpected honesty or her sudden flagrant
absurdity. She's got good comic timing too, something difficult to find in
the written word. Why didn't that voice ever come out in her novels?
Now it has. In Austenland Shannon Hale finally lets her hair down and
makes us laugh; at ourselves, at people who wish they lived on a country
estate in Regency England, at the sad absurdity of the modern dating scene,
and at her leading lady's wit, insight, and hijinks.
Be warned, THIS IS NOT A CHILDRENS' BOOK. In fact, I thought I could sense
Hale trying a bit too hard to be adult. Nothing flagrantly distasteful
happens on the page, but still, I'm not letting my daughter read it until
she's much older and has watched a lot of those Jane Austen movie adaptations.
In Austenland, Jane, our leading lady, is bequeathed an all expense paid
vacation to an obscure resort in England where the guests are required to
spend three weeks dressing in gowns and corsets and acting like it is 1802.
Jane figures this will cure her of her obsession with Colin Firth once and
for all. Intriguing premise! As the story unfolds Jane swings between
trying to buck the system and trying to put her whole heart into the act,
wondering in between just how much of it is real.
Towards the end of the story when Jane realizes just how fake everyone and
everything on this vacation has been, I eagerly anticipated a return to the real
world. I must say I was disappointed by the denouement. Sure, I expected
at least one of the actors to really fall in love with Jane, but it
could have been handled with more realism, in contrast to all that fakey
stuff that came earlier.
In spite of the slight let down at the end, the book gave me a lot to think
about. Is fantasy a place to prepare for the real world, or is it a
worthless escape? Hale puts forth both ideas because both can be true.
I believe the important thing to remember is that it is all real. Our
fantasies are real fantasies, we really have them, and we shouldn't pretend
we're not accountable for them. They have the power shape us, perhaps even
more power than "real" external events have to shape us. This is one of my
favorite themes in fiction, and Austenland has plenty to say about
it.
I'm still a fan.
But we all agree over here that Haddix is going to have a Newbury Medal before long.
Mulls leads are fabulous. Kendra nearly walks off the page, and her trouble-prone little brother Seth is emerging as one of my all time favorite fictional characters. Their fantasy adventure is touched with some unexpected bits of realism that drew me right in and almost made me believe it could have happened.
On the other hand, I must say that Mull deserves a better editor. As I read I went from saying, "Wow! This stuff is fabulous! What genius! What imagination!" to "Hmm, the editor should have caught that one." Not that there were any typos or mispellings or anything like that. It was only that I had to read some of the sentences two or three times in order to decode their meaning, some passages were confusing, and sometimes the dialogue got out of focus. At times I felt like shaking one of the characters and saying "LOOK OUT! THE AUTHOR IS MIND CONTROLLING YOU TO MAKE YOU EXPLAIN THINGS TO THE AUDIENCE!" And yes, I care enough about the characters and the story to wish there had been another revision or two before the book went to print.
All my pickiness aside, the Fablehaven books are just exactly the sort of books I wish I could have read when I was fourteen years old, but that really didn't exist back then. Smart, sophisticated, funny, exciting, adventurous, and clean as a whistle, I'm pleased and grateful that all of my children will have them to enjoy.
My mother-in-law works at a book store. This suits me fine! For birthdays, instead of clothes
or toys, my children get books! Lloyd Alexander's The Gawgon and the Boy came in a box
with a few other books as a gift to my ten year old son a few weeks ago. I recognized the
author's name of course, as I had read all the Prydain books both as a child and then again
as an adult. Neither pass had impressed me greatly, so at first I regarded the book with cool
disinterest. Could Lloyd Alexander still be writing books? Inside the front cover, the list of
his published works spanned two pages. Still, I was skeptical. With his reputation, he could
probably publish any old thing.
So the book languished on my front room table. One day I picked it up during what was supposed
to be a five minute break from house cleaning. I opened the book, turned over the table of
contents, and found the little bylines on the family tree perfectly charming. Intrigued, I
went on to page one and was immediately caught by the cheerful, boyish relish the main character
felt for having a near fatal case of pneumonia. I read on. Every page I tell myself that it
will be the last, that I must get up and do more housework, but this book is a delight! Only
decades of writing fiction can give an author the poise to dash off such a piece of work.
Finally, in chapter five, I managed to tear myself away for a few hours, but I was soon back.
The convalescent boy is put under the tutelage of an elderly aunt. At first frightened of his
aunt, whom he nicknames "Gawgon" after the gorgon Medusa, the boy soon finds out there's more
to the old woman than he thought.
My favorite parts of the book are the yarns the boy spins in his imagination. A delightful blend
of history, mythology, literature, geometry, and an eleven year old sense of high adventure,
these stories kept me laughing as the boy's family faces the Great Depression and the changes
it brings about in their lives.
In the friendship between the boy and his aunt I remembered my favorite teachers, the ones who
really inspired me to learn. I loved the jolly cast of the boy's eccentric extended family.
Full of sparkly, funny bits, this book is a marvelous read. I highly recommend it.
So why weren't those Prydain books more like this? I suppose thirty years of writing books
does count for something.
Well, I may have to eat my words once again. Now Deseret Book has this "Shadow Mountain" label, and author Brandon Mull has published a book under that label that is just my favorite sort of fantasy novel.
This book gets so many things right that other fantasy novels for children typically miss. First of all, the adults are smart, reasonable, and willing to trust the children when they show they are worthy to be trusted. Second, there is a strong theme running through the book about how keeping the rules affords you strong protection against evil, and how breaking the rules can have serious, unforseen consequences. It is the cautious, obedient character who has the power to save the day at the end because she has kept the rules of Fablehaven and offended no one.
Brandon Mull has a spectacular imagination. His powers of description are stunning, and he is endlessly inventive. The fantastic creatures that inhabit Fablehaven are fascinatingly varied in their personalities, intelligence, and behavior. He's not bad with humans either. His two main characters scrap so much like real siblings I wonder if he bugged his kids' rooms and listened to their arguments as research for his book. The book is not quite Newbury quality - there are a few places where the dialogue stops sounding real and instead becomes a thinly veiled explanation for the reader. In spite of this, Mull does create a very convincing sense of peril in Fablehaven, a place both wonderful and treacherous. It is just the sort of fantasy world you love to believe in.
We liked this book so much we headed out to Deseret Book to buy ourselves a hard copy even before we'd turned the copy we read back in to the library. That says a lot. And now I'm considering maybe submitting a manuscript to Shadow Mountain, if I ever get one finished.
And by the way, while I was there at Deseret Book, I couldn't help noticing that Dallyn's CD, "Prayer" was up there on the "Bestsellers" shelf at the front of the store. Hooray for Dallyn! If you haven't got a copy of his CD yet, go to dallynvailbayles.com to order one, or visit any store where LDS books and music are sold.
-RJC
Top of Page
Uprising
by Margaret Peterson Haddix
Simon and Schuster 2007
My Freshman Year
by Rebekah Nathan
Cornell University Press 2005
-RJC
Project Mulberry
by Linda Sue Park
Yearling 2005
-RJC
Chasing Vermeer
by Blue Balliett, illustrated by Brett Helquist
Scholastic 2004
Austenland
2007 Bloomsbury
-RJC
Dexter the Tough
Dexter the Tough by Margeret Peterson Haddix is different from the other books by this author. She's left the realm of science fiction and tried her hand at an ordinary school book. I found it well written, compelling, accurately drawn, but it was missing that spark of individuality that lets me know I'm reading a Haddix book. It could have been written by Andrew Clements or Louis Sachar or Beverly Cleary. I guess that might be a high compliment to an up and coming author like Haddix, but I missed her strong personal voice so evident in the "Hidden Children" series. Sort of the way Lund's "Work and the Glory" books are more polished than "The Alliance" but they're missing the freshness.
Fablehaven II
Author Brandon Mull is the rising star of this story. He hits the ground running in this second book with a first chapter full of laughs, magic, and tween-aged characters so believable you think he must have picked them up from the middle school right down the street. This book is more exciting than the first installment of the Fablehaven series. Right from the start, Mull creates a sense that no one can be trusted, the stakes are high, and the danger is real.
The Gawgon and the Boy
by Lloyd Alexander
Fablehaven
I always said I'd never publish fiction with Deseret Book. My young women's leaders were always giving me cheesy LDS novels for my birthday. I dutifully read them, and promised myself I'd never write anything like that, ever. I certainly wasn't going to write any of the sort of things Deseret Book published, so why publish with them?