43 Old Cemetery Road, Books 1-3 by Karen and M. Sarah Klise

August 28, 2011 by Leave a Comment

43 Old Cemetery Road is a quirky illustrated series for children that tells its ghostly story using letters, newspaper clippings, drawings, et cetera. There are three books in the series so far—Dying to Meet You (2009), Over My Dead Body (2009), and Till Death Do Us Bark (2011)—with a fourth (The Phantom of the Post Office) due in May 2012.

Dying to Meet You
What with the illustrations and the fact that the story is told through correspondence rendered in a large font, Dying to Meet You is a very quick read. And yet, for all that, it’s got some nuance!

Ignatius B. Grumply is a famous children’s author who hasn’t written anything for twenty years. Seeking to overcome his writer’s block, he rents a Victorian house in Ghastly, Illinois and is decidedly miffed to discover a boy and his cat living there. The boy, Seymour Hope, has been left behind by his parents, the owners of the home, who are on a lecture tour of Europe. They’re paranormal experts, and had moved into Spence Mansion hoping to confirm the existence of its rumored spectral resident. When Seymour could see her, but they couldn’t, they became convinced that a) ghosts don’t exist and b) their son is delusional.

But Olive C. Spence, the ghost of the woman who originally built the house, is indeed real! She sets out to drive Ignatius away at first, but after an incident with a chandelier causes more injury than she had intended, she begins to feel sorry for him and decides to help him with his book. It turns out that all of them have been rejected in one form or another: Seymour by his parents, Olive by the publishers who would never give her graphic epistolary mysteries a chance, and Ignatius by the woman he loved and upon whom he squandered his fortune.

Olive encourages “selfish and crabby” Ignatius to feel and care about others again, and thus achieves a warm and fuzzy ending where each of them gets something they want while drawing together into their own little family. It’s quite sweet, really. About the only complaint I could make is that some of the punny names are not funny—Paige Turner, Frank N. Beans, Shirley U. Jest—but I did have to snicker at Fay Tality and her dog, Mort, so they’re not all clunkers.

Over My Dead Body
Life at 43 Old Cemetery Road has been great since Ignatius, Olive, and Seymour began collaborating on a series of ghost stories. When a letter from Dick Tater, head of the International Movement for the Safety & Protection of Our Kids & Youth, arrives, however, everything is turned upside down. Tater objects to their living arrangements, especially the fact that custody of eleven-year-old Seymour was seemingly transferred via a rental lease, and his investigation results in Ignatius being committed to an asylum and Seymour being sent to an orphanage until his opportunistic parents deign to claim him.

The majority of the book is comprised of letters to and from Olive as everyone ponders how to escape confinement and satisfy the customers who have prepaid for the next three installments of their story. Dick Tater does various nefarious things, like canceling Halloween and instructing libraries to burn books that meet with his disapproval, and the book has a very pro-reading, pro-free thinking vibe as a result.

The book also features the second “just go with it” moment of the series. I assume this is going to be a recurring thing. In the first book, readers had to “just go with” the stipulation that sales of the trio’s stories (at $3 a pop, if I recall rightly) were sufficient to raise the $250,000 Seymour needed to buy Spence Mansion from his parents. Here, Ignatius and Olive (a ghost, mind you) are able to adopt Seymour simply by proving his parents don’t love him.

To this I say, “Whatever.” I am willing to go with it because it results in (nicely illustrated) passages like this, which I confess made me a bit verklempt. (Best attempted after you remind yourself of Seymour’s last name.)

And so, in a sense, we end where we began… in a 32½-room house built by a woman who, in her lifetime, never married or had children… and rented by a man who never married and always thought he disliked children… and purchased by a boy whose parents abandoned him. And so, even though one member of the family might still get grumpy now and then… and another might become cranky when she misplaces her glasses… neither would ever, could ever, abandon Hope.

Sniff.

Till Death Do Us Bark
One day, a shaggy dog follows Seymour home from the library. He has always wanted a dog, and so he asks his new parents, Ignatius and Olive, if he can keep him. They have reservations, and insist that he first attempt to find the dog’s owner, since he has a collar and everything. Seymour soon learns that the dog formerly belonged to Noah Breth, a wealthy man who recently died and whose children (Kitty and Kanine) are bickering over their presumed inheritance. But he doesn’t tell his parents this.

I must say that I did not like this book as well as the others. I like that Seymour admits that his goal was to be a perfect son, but that very quickly he was keeping secrets and running away. What I don’t like was how he was so passionately dog crazy when his best friend up ’til now has been his cat, Shadow. He didn’t show much concern that Shadow had seemingly run away after the dog showed up. And Ignatius, who is allergic to cats, suddenly had a flare-up and pledged to “get rid” of the cat once it was found. This is not the way to endear me to your characters, Klise sisters.

Of course, everything works out fine in the end and Shadow is nearby and well. The Breth siblings, who have been following a series of limericks devised by their late father on the hunt for his fortune, are shamed into suddenly becoming nicer people. A rare coin that everyone’s been looking for turns out to be exactly where it was telegraphed to be at the beginning of the story.

As a result, more than the other books, this one feels like something only children would enjoy. I hope the upcoming fourth book represents a return to form.

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The Lying Game by Sara Shepard

August 25, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the front flap:
The worst part of being dead is that there’s nothing left to live for. No more kisses. No more secrets. No more gossip. It’s enough to kill a girl all over again. But I’m about to get something no one else does—an encore performance, thanks to Emma, the long-lost twin sister I never even got to meet.

Now Emma’s desperate to know what happened to me. And the only way to figure it out is to be—to slip into my old life and piece it all together. But can she laugh at inside jokes with my best friends? Convince my boyfriend she’s the girl he fell in love with? Pretend to be a happy, carefree daughter when she hugs my parents good night? And can she keep up the charade, even after she realizes my murderer is watching her every move?

Review:
The Lying Game is the second collaborative effort between Sara Shepard and Alloy Entertainment (the team that brought you Pretty Little Liars) to be made into a TV series for ABC Family. I thought that this time I’d try reading the book before starting the show, so here we are.

Emma Paxton was raised by her unstable mother Becky until the age of five, when Becky skipped town while Emma was at a friend’s house. After Becky could not be located, Emma entered the foster care system, where she developed the ability to hold her tongue and become “whatever type of girl the situation needed [her] to be.” Now two weeks shy of her eighteenth birthday, Emma is hoping to make it through her senior year of high school and even dreams of attending USC and becoming an investigative journalist. Her skeevy foster brother has other plans, however, and Emma is soon accused of theft and told she must go when she turns eighteen.

Skeevy also shows Emma a video of a girl who looks just like her engaging in what looks like asphyxiation-for-kicks. From the video, Emma gleans that the girl is called Sutton and lives in Arizona. Googling leads to a Facebook page, and Emma’s message yields an invite from Sutton, who confirms that she was adopted. Without hesitation, Emma packs her bags and heads to Tucson.

Sutton fails to show for their appointed rendezvous, however, and when Sutton’s friends show up to whisk her off to a party, Emma finds herself using her adaptability skills to assume her sister’s role. Conveniently, Emma’s bag containing her cash and ID are stolen at this point. The next morning, she gets a note informing her that Sutton’s dead and that she’d better play along or she’ll be next. Emma tries various times to tell people what’s going on—Sutton’s parents, the police—but because Sutton was such a notorious prankster (more in a malicious way than a fun way) nobody believes her. Soon, Emma grows to suspect Sutton’s circle of friends may have offed their leader, and by the end of the book she’s learned the truth about the video but isn’t any farther along in discovering who killed her sister.

The Lying Game is definitely a guilty pleasure, and I already have the second volume in the series (Never Have I Ever) checked out from the library. Still, there are a couple of things about it that bugged me. The major issue for me is the choice to have Sutton stick around as an unseen-by-Emma ghostly presence. Conveniently, she has access to Emma’s thoughts, and so takes narrative duties, but in a really strange way. She’ll be narrating along omnisciently, referring to herself as “Sutton” or to things that belonged to her as “Sutton’s,” just like Emma might, and then all of a sudden she’ll switch into first person narration, using “me” and “mine.” It’s pretty distracting.

It’s also highly convenient that Sutton can’t remember many details of her past or see anything if Emma can’t see anything. She is, therefore, little use if Emma is in peril, though her timely recollections of snatches of memory do serve to heighten the dramatic tension when readers know something that Emma doesn’t. Mostly, however, I have the inkling that Sutton is there to react remorsefully when Emma discovers some of the horrible things she has done. Is Ghost!Sutton just a ploy to try to get us to care about her? In life, Sutton was a thoroughly nasty and entitled person, which makes this the second Shepard/Alloy series that focuses on the death of a girl so odious one wonders why she had any friends at all.

And that’s the second problem I had with The Lying Game: it’s too much like Pretty Little Liars. Granted, maybe that’s what fans of PLL want, but as I watched the action build towards a social event (a party, naturally) and watched Emma jump to conclusions I had the distinct feeling that I had been through all this before. There’s somewhat less focus on brand name fashions, at least.

Still, as mentioned, I will keep reading. And I’ll check out the show, too. Shepard is good at injecting twists into the story to hook a reader, and I like that Emma is beginning to have feelings for Ethan (a broody, poetry-reading boy) and seems poised to have an ally in her efforts going forward. Then they can jump to conclusions together, just like the girls in PLL!

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Perfect by Sara Shepard

August 20, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the front flap:
In a town where gossip thrives like the ivy that clings to its mansions, where mysteries lie behind manicured hedges and skeletons hide in every walk-in closet, four perfect-looking girls aren’t nearly as perfect as they seem.

Spencer, Aria, Emily, Hanna, and the best friend Alison were once the girls at Rosewood Day School. They were the girls everyone loved but secretly hated—especially Alison. So when Alison mysteriously vanished, the girls’ grief was tinged with… relief. And when Alison’s body was later discovered in her own backyard, the girls were forced to unearth some ugly memories of their old friend, too. Could there have been more to Alison’s death than anyone realizes?

Now someone named A, someone who seems to know everything, is pointing the finger at one of them for Alison’s murder. As their secrets get darker and their scandals turn deadly, A is poised to ruin their perfect little lives forever.

Review:
Shit just gets so much worse in this installment of the Pretty Little Liars series that all I can do is shake my head. And still, I continue to read and eagerly await the answers promised in the fourth volume (originally intended to be the end of the series), so make of that what you will.

Anyway, some fairly awful things happen to the titular liars in this book, set three weeks after Flawless, the majority of them courtesy of A. Aria is ousted from her home because her mom can’t stand to look at her since Aria has known about her father’s infidelity for three years without ever mentioning it. Emily is outed at a school swim meet, and her parents threaten to send her to live with puritanical relations in Iowa unless she attends de-gaying therapy. Hanna still hasn’t heard from her father and now her best friend Mona is pissed at her too, culminating in a cringeworthy moment at Mona’s big birthday party followed by Hanna getting hit by a car.

You might think this couldn’t be topped for dramatic potential, but Spencer (who spends most of the book angsting about an essay contest) discovers a personal history of blackouts and gradually begins to recall what happened the night Ali disappeared. Meanwhile, A gives out lots of clues and hints about the murder, though their veracity is suspect.

I think I may be running out of things to say about this series, so perhaps it will suffice to say “the whirlwind of cray-cray continues.” It’s hard to feel much sympathy for Aria’s plight—not so much the getting kicked out of her house thing, but what follows—or Spencer’s, because both are very much “you’ve made your bed, now you’ve got to lie in it” types of situations. Emily seems to have fewer chapters devoted to her this time, which makes me wonder whether Shepard realized the endless on-again, off-again relationship with Maya was getting boring.

As in the TV show, Hanna continues to be my favorite. While it’s absolutely awful reading about her utter humiliation at Mona’s party, it does seem to cause her to question what her quest for perfection has really been about. Maybe she’ll learn to embrace her dorky side and will stick with Lucas, the sweet-but-uncool boy who thinks she’s wonderful just the way she is. But then again, with this series, hoping for a happy ending for anyone is probably futile.

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Deception on His Mind by Elizabeth George

August 18, 2011 by 2 Comments

From the front flap:
Balford-le-Nez is a dying seatown on the coast of Essex. But when a member of the town’s small but growing Asian* community is found dead on its beach, his neck broken, sleepy Balford-le-Nez ignites. Working solo, without her long-time partner Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, Sergeant Barbara Havers must probe not only the mind of a murderer and a case very close to her own heart, but the terrible price people pay for deceiving others… and themselves.

* Evidently, Brits use the term “Asian” to apply to people whom Americans would call “Middle Eastern.”

Review:
As a fan of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers, I was chuffed to discover that Deception on His Mind features Barbara in the role of main protagonist, as her superior officer, Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, is away on his honeymoon. While I like Barbara even more after this outing, especially after she gives voice to one long-overdue “sod you” in the book’s final pages, I unexpectedly found myself missing Lynley.

This isn’t Barbara’s fault at all, however. Instead, I lay the blame at Detective Inspector Emily Barlow, an acquaintance of Barbara’s who is the lead investigator of the murder of Haytham Querashi, a Pakistani immigrant who has come to England to marry Sahlah Malik, daughter of a local businessman, and work in her father’s factory. Barbara gets involved in the case when her neighbor, Taymullah Azhar, is summoned by his cousin (Sahlah’s brother Mohannad) to help advise the family. She wants to help him out and when she discovers that Barlow is heading up the case, she offers to assist. It soon becomes apparent that Barlow harbors racist attitudes, as she spends the entire book focused on pinning the crime on Mohannad and balking any time Barbara finds evidence that suggests a white person might have been involved.

This, as you might imagine, gets incredibly frustrating. In fact, I think the whole theme of the book must be “people seeing only what they want to see,” because there are several characters who exhibit this quality. Sahlah’s friend, Rachel, is deluded that pregnant Sahlah will be able to have a happy-ever-after romance with rich and white Theo Shaw. And, failing that, that Sahlah would be content to spend her days living with her in a cozy flat by the sea. She and Sahlah have several tedious conversations about the unlikelihood of these events occurring, but Rachel never seems to get it. Meanwhile, Rachel’s mum, fit and attractive Connie, refuses to see facially deformed Rachel as anything but lovely and Yumn, Mohannad’s odious wife, sees herself as Allah’s gift to humanity for her ability to bear sons for her husband and abuses her position to order Sahlah about imperiously. (She also seems to have an unhealthy fixation with her children’s nether regions.)

Icky and irritating characters aside, the investigation into Querashi’s death is fairly interesting. I learned a new bit of British slang—cottaging—and really enjoyed the trust that develops between Barbara and Azhar. They’re an unlikely match, but now I totally want them to get together, especially since Azhar’s ray-of-sunshine daughter, Hadiyyah, loves Barbara so much and is loved in return. Events culminate in a rather exciting boat chase, and I liked that Barlow’s instinctive suspicions aren’t entirely wrong, after all. I was confused by a couple of things, however, and especially disappointed when Barbara failed to mention a bit of evidence that would prove Querashi’s good intentions when Barlow got it into her head that he’d been blackmailing Mohannad. I think George dropped the ball there.

Overall, this is not my favorite Lynley mystery, but it shows Barbara in a good light and offers interesting ramifications for her in the future. I’ve just discovered there’s a new Lynley mystery due in January, and my goal is to get caught up by then, so expect more reviews of this series in the months to come.

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Flawless by Sara Shepard

August 13, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the front flap:
In the exclusive town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania, where the sweetest smiles hide the darkest secrets, four pretty little liars—Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna—have been very bad girls…

Spencer stole her sister’s boyfriend, Aria is brokenhearted over her English teacher, Emily likes her new friend Maya… as much more than a friend. And Hanna’s obsession with looking flawless is literally making her sick. But the most horrible secret of all is something so scandalous it could destroy their perfect little lives.

And someone named “A” is threatening to do just that. At first they thought A was Alison, their friend who vanished three years ago… but then Alison turned up dead. One thing’s for certain: A’s got the dirt to bury them all alive, and with every crumpled note, wicked IM, and vindictive text message A sends, the girls get a little closer to losing it all.

Review:
In this, the second book of the Pretty Little Liars series, bad things continue to happen to the pulchritudinous prevaricators, often of their own making but sometimes not. Spencer risks her family’s wrath (and her academic standing) by sneaking off to see Wren, her sister’s ex-boyfriend. Emily tries very hard to not be gay, and ends up taking as a date to the big charity dance a boy who may have killed Alison. Hanna is desperate to earn her father’s love, but A (and a bitchy soon-to-be step-sister) sees to it that he finds out about her various transgressions. And Aria tries to derail her father’s extramarital affair while growing closer to the guy who dumped Hanna, like, eight days ago.

While I could never claim that this series is a shining achievement in literature, it certainly is entertaining (in the most crackalicious way possible). Each book seems to cover about a week in the lives of these four girls and, seriously, if I had this much crazy crap going on in my life, I think I would end up catatonic. As before, chapters alternate between the four girls as they each deal with their own secrets and various threats from A. This time, they’ve decided that A must be Toby, a neighbor who took the blame when one of Alison’s pranks resulted in dire injury to his sister. By the end of the novel, they’ve convinced themselves that Toby also killed Alison for revenge, though the revelation of the existence of an airtight alibi throws that into question.

I can’t help but come at this series from the perspective of someone who’s been watching the TV show. The differences between the two versions of the story are widening, and it’s interesting to me to see how the producers of the show decided to take the story in new directions. On the show, for example, Aria is still (as of the last episode I saw, anyway) hooking up with her English teacher. Here, she seems to have moved on, and with Hanna’s ex, to boot. Spencer never had sex with Wren on the show, nor was it ever mentioned that she used to be a chronic sleepwalker. In the books, the girls have not resumed their friendship as enthusiastically. Most importantly, though, someone dies in this book who is still very much alive on the show!

This makes me happy, because I accidentally spoiled myself on the identity of A in the books. This robs me of some suspense while reading, unfortunately, but at the same time all these changes suggest that A could very well be someone completely different in the TV version, and that I can’t necessarily expect people who are benevolent in one format to be the same in another. That’s pretty neat.

For me, Pretty Little Liars is the epitome of a guilty pleasure.

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Skyfall by Catherine Asaro

August 2, 2011 by 2 Comments

From the back cover:
Skyfall goes back to the beginning, to the rebirth of Skolia, showing how a chance meeting on a backwater planet forges a vast interstellar empire. Eldrinson, a provincial ruler on a primitive planet, is plagued by inner demons. But when he meets Roca, a beautiful and mysterious woman from the stars, he whisks her away to his mountain retreat, inadvertently starting a great interstellar war, and birthing the next generation of rulers for the Skolian Empire.

Review:
Skyfall is technically the ninth book in Catherine Asaro’s Saga of the Skolian Empire series, but is first if one is reading in internal chronological order. It works well as an entry point, though there were a few things that could’ve used a bit more explanation—presumably this happens in the books that were actually published before this one.

Beautiful and golden (like, literally) Roca Skolia is a “Ruby Psion,” an extremely rare and valued psion descended from similarly rare parents who currently rule the Skolian Imperialate. Because of her pedigree, she is expected to marry someone of the ruling assembly’s choosing and produce more Ruby Psions, the only people capable of controlling “the Kyle web,” an instantaneous interstellar network that somehow protects Skolia. Roca’s been married twice before and her grown son, Kurj, has a lot of mental anguish about the death of his father, the abuse perpetrated by his stepfather, and the atrocities committed by another group of psions who relish the pain of others.

When Roca’s away on government business (she’s the foreign affairs councillor), Kurj calls an assembly vote to discuss going to war with the sadistic psions. She knows he’ll try to stop her from casting her dissenting vote, so goes underground to try to make it back home in time without attracting his notice. Her route takes her to a remote, unspoiled world called Skyfall by “the Allieds” (descendents of Earth) and Lyshriol by its natives. There, her plans are foiled by a treacherous snow storm, and while she waits for it to pass, she falls in love with Eldri, a passionate and epileptic bard with significant psionic gifts, and ends up pregnant just in time for Eldri’s rival to lay siege to his castle.

It wouldn’t be incorrect to label Skyfall as “a romance novel in space.” Certainly Roca’s relationship with Eldri, who believes she’s a gift from the sun gods and is otherwise baffled by the technology she sees as commonplace, is quite romantic, with the two of them drawn together pretty much instantly and conceiving easily when other Ruby Psion births have required much medical intervention to achieve. Roca’s position brings political factors into their relationship, however. It turns out that Lyshriol was once a Skolian colony, so when Kurj eventually comes looking for her and Roca’s family finds out she has actually married this “barbarian,” it is ultimately Eldri’s genes that convince them to accept him (after a barrage of tests during which Eldri’s mental abilities and illness are evaluated).

There aren’t a whole lot of sci-fi elements to the novel, though there are enough to give one a picture of how things work in the Skolian Empire and its relationships with other spacefaring people. Genetic manipulation seems quite normal, as are cybernetic implants, and I am totally envious of the language node Roca has, which enables her to process and gradually learn new languages. Kurj has turned himself into an intimidating metallic giant, but it’s still not enough to shield him from his self-conflicting inner demons. In his case, Asaro effectively uses technology to show just how damaged he is, with some pretty fascinating results.

Suffice it to say, I’m looking forward to reading more in this series!

Additional reviews of Skyfall can be found at Triple Take.

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The Strange Case of Origami Yoda by Tom Angleberger

July 17, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
Meet Dwight, a sixth-grade oddball. Dwight does a lot of weird things, like wearing the same t-shirt for a month or telling people to call him “Captain Dwight.” This is embarrassing, particularly for Tommy, who sits with him at lunch every day.

But Dwight does one cool thing. He makes origami. One day he makes an origami finger puppet of Yoda. And that’s when things get mysterious. Origami Yoda can predict the future and suggest the best way to deal with a tricky situation. His advice actually works, and soon most of the sixth grade is lining up with questions.

Tommy wants to know how Origami Yoda can be so smart when Dwight himself is so clueless. Is Yoda tapping into the Force? It’s crucial that Tommy figure out the mystery before he takes Yoda’s advice about something VERY IMPORTANT that has to do with a girl.

This is Tommy’s case file of his investigation into “The Strange Case of Origami Yoda.”

Review:
If you had asked me to sum up The Strange Case of Origami Yoda in one word, my initial answer would have simply been “cute.” When I first finished it, I was left with a pleasant impression but wasn’t sure I had too much to say about it. After a period of mulling, however, I realized that, even if the story itself is fairly straightforward, Angleberger does some interesting things with the way he tells it.

“The big question,” protagonist Tommy begins, “is Origami Yoda real?” The weirdest kid in sixth grade, Dwight, has made an origami Yoda finger puppet, which seems to dispense good advice even though Dwight himself is a big spaz. Tommy compiles a case file of students’ interactions with Yoda in an effort to determine if he’s for real and, therefore, if his advice concerning the girl that Tommy likes should be followed or if it will lead to total humiliation. He allows his friends to add comments and doodles, giving the book a bit of flair.

Origami Yoda offers advice on various topics, like helping a boy not burst into angry tears whenever he strikes out in softball, or helping another kid live down an unwelcome nickname (“Cheeto Hog”). Each chapter recounts a different incident, and though they are nominally written by different students, there is no discernible difference in narrative voice, except in the case of Harvey, Tommy’s obnoxious friend.

Angleberger doesn’t spell out the answer concerning Yoda’s authenticity in detail, but he does show that Tommy gradually gets fed up of Harvey “criticizing everything and everybody all the time” and realizes that he would rather be friends with Dwight, even if he is an oddball. Everyone probably has a toxic friend like Harvey at some point and must make the difficult decision to stop associating with them, and I thought Angleberger handled Tommy’s revelation in this regard rather well.

He also incorporates themes of inclusion and tolerance with subtlety. At no point, for example, is a racial characteristic ever assigned for any of these characters. We know that Tommy is short with unruly hair, Harvey is perpetually smirking, and Kellen is thin, but that’s it. Too, one of the female characters is described as “cute and cool” before it’s revealed a few paragraphs later that she also happens to be deaf. True, characterization doesn’t go much deeper than this for anyone, but I still appreciated the lack of preachiness.

Again, I come back to the idea that The Strange Case of Origami Yoda is a cute read, but I reckon late elementary Star Wars fans would have fun with it. A sequel, Darth Paper Strikes Back (in which Harvey is out for revenge), is due out next month.

Additional reviews of The Strange Case of Origami Yoda can be found at Triple Take.

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The Phoenix and the Carpet by E. Nesbit

July 7, 2011 by Leave a Comment

From the back cover:
It’s startling enough to have a Phoenix hatch in your house, but even more startling when it reveals you have a magic carpet on the floor. Conceited it may be, but the Phoenix is also good-hearted, and obligingly accompanies the children on their adventures through time and space—which, magic being what it is, rarely turn out as they were meant…

Review:
The Phoenix and the Carpet (1904) is the second book in the trilogy that begins with Five Children and It. It’s November now and the children—Cyril, Anthea, Robert, Jane, and baby brother “the Lamb”—are back at home in Camden Town. One day, after a small fire ruins their nursery carpet, their mother buys a new one from which emerges a shiny yellow egg. And when that egg falls into the fire, a talking Phoenix is hatched who informs them that the new carpet is actually magic and can take them wherever they’d like to go.

As with the first book in the trilogy, most of the story is comprised of the wishes the children make and their often unexpected outcomes. They wish to go abroad, for example, so the carpet takes them to visit a topless tower in France, where Robert promptly gets stuck on a window ledge. On another occasion, the cook accidentally accompanies them on a trip to a sunny shore and ends up being worshipped by the natives. Other wishes involve visits to India and a plethora of Persian cats.

What’s different this time is that more of the wishes are linked. When the children wish to do a bit of good, they find themselves back in France, where they find the rightful owners of the treasure hidden in the tower. And when a would-be burglar is arrested on suspicion of having stolen said Persian cats, the children rescue him from jail and convey him to the sunny shore, whereupon he promptly falls in love with the cook and they get married on the spot. The emphasis on helping people makes this installment of the series a little more like The Railway Children, which still remains my favorite Nesbit book.

While the adventures are fun—my very favorite is not a wish at all, but a visit the children make with the Phoenix to a fire insurance company who uses his likeness for their logo—Nesbit’s writing is really the main draw here. It’s warm, observant, and clever simultaneously, eliciting many a giggle. I love this evocative line about a cast-aside bit of correspondence:

”The letter… lay on the table, drinking hot bacon fat with one corner and eating marmalade with the other.”

That line not only conjures a vivid mental picture, but tells you something about the letter’s recipients, as well. And, indeed, the characterization of the children is more defined in this second outing, with the two eldest (Cyril and Anthea) showing signs of increased maturity. Nesbit never idealizes the children—“The children were not particularly handsome, nor were they extra clever, nor extraordinarily good. But they were not bad sorts on the whole.”—and their imperfections are what make them likeable. When they discover that sometimes things can get worn out through striving to please, one gets the sense that they’ve learned an Important Lesson about consideration without it coming across as some sort of moral.

Though less famous, The Phoenix and the Carpet is actually better than the first book in the trilogy, and I am definitely looking forward to the third and final installment.

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Pretty Little Liars by Sara Shepard

July 1, 2011 by 2 Comments

From the front flap:
Gossip thrives amid the Mercedes-Benzes, mega mansions, and perfectly manicured hedges in the exclusive town of Rosewood, Pennsylvania. Behind their big Gucci sunglasses, beneath their perfectly pressed Polos, everyone has something to hide, especially high school juniors Spencer, Aria, Emily, and Hanna. Spencer covets her sister’s gorgeous new boyfriend. Aria is having an affair with her English teacher. Emily is infatuated with the new girl at school. And Hanna is using some ugly tricks to stay beautiful. Deeper and darker still is a horrible secret the girls have shared since sixth grade—a secret they thought was safe forever.

Review:
Confession: I have become addicted to the ABC Family adaptation of Pretty Little Liars. Now that it has started its second season, I figured it was safe to read the first book in the series. As it turns out, said book only covers the first few episodes of the show, so I needn’t have delayed.

The series was originally developed by Alloy Entertainment—who is behind most of the YA novel series that have recently become TV shows—to be a kind of teen version of Desperate Housewives. (I’d say that description is pretty apt, except that I think Pretty Little Liars is the better show, largely because when your protagonists do really stupid things it’s more forgivable when they’re sixteen than when they’re thirty-something.) Even though Sara Shepard receives sole authorship credits, interviews suggest that it’s really a team effort.

The first novel sets up the series and the secrets that each of its four protagonists carries. Back in sixth and seventh grade, Aria, Hanna, Spencer, and Emily clustered around their dazzling queen bee, Alison, who alternately beguiled and belittled them (and many others). She goaded them into a dangerous act of vandalism that left a fellow student blinded—an incident henceforth referred to as “the Jenna thing”—and then disappeared the summer before eighth grade. Aria’s family moved to Iceland shortly thereafter and the remaining girls—grieving but a little relieved to be free of Alison’s influence—drifted apart.

Now, three years later, Aria is back and so, possibly, is Alison, since each of the four girls begins receiving mysterious messages (text, e-mail, and handwritten) from someone calling themselves only “A.” A seems to know everyone’s secrets, and there are many. Bohemian Aria is having a secret fling with her English teacher, and also knows that her dad was cheating on her mom three years ago; obedient Emily is secretly attracted to girls; overachieving Spencer is not-so-secretly attracted to her sister’s boyfriend; and Hanna—impatient, impulsive, newly popular Hanna—secretly feels desperately unloved, and has a couple scrapes with the law while trying to conquer her bulimia. Chapters alternate between the characters, and it’s only at the end, when they discover that they’ve all been A’s victims, that they seem poised to renew their friendship.

It’s hard for me to say how I would feel about the novel had I not seen the show. There are differences, of course—a different timeline of events, characters who do not resemble the actresses ultimately chosen to portray them, some siblings for Emily, more bad behavior than ABC Family evidently was comfortable with—but nothing major plot-wise. I think the TV series is more effective at humanizing the characters—especially Hanna, who unexpectedly became my favorite—and making them likeable, but reading the book helped me understand the characters better, especially Aria and Emily.

So, why should you check out Pretty Little Liars, in either of its forms? For the cracktastic soapy goodness with protagonists whom you can still like even if they do ridiculous things like steal their boyfriend’s car because he won’t put out and crash it into a tree. Sure, I’m a little embarrassed to be reading/watching it at my advanced age, but it entertains me, and sometimes that’s enough.

Filed Under: Books, Suspense, YA Tagged With:

Unwind by Neal Shusterman

June 23, 2011 by 2 Comments

From the front flap:
In a society where unwanted teens are salvaged for their body parts, three runaways fight the system that would “unwind” them.

Connor’s parents want to be rid of him because he’s a troublemaker. Risa has no parents and is being unwound to cut orphanage costs. Lev’s unwinding has been planned since his birth, as pat of his family’s strict religion. Brought together by chance, and kept together by desperation, these three unlikely companions make a harrowing cross-country journey, knowing their lives hang in the balance. If they can survive until their eighteenth birthday, they can’t be harmed—but when every piece of them, from their hands to their hearts, [is] wanted by a world gone mad, eighteen seems far, far away.

Review:
At some time in America’s future, the second civil war is fought over the issue of abortion. In the end, a compromise is reached. Known as the “bill of life,” the law says that life cannot be touched between birth and age thirteen, but between thirteen and eighteen parents can choose to retroactively abort a child in a process known as “unwinding,” by which the child does not technically die but is instead used for organ donation. Unwinding has now become a common and accepted practice in society.

This is a lot to swallow. One wonders why on earth anyone would agree to such a compromise, and I admit I struggled with the concept. After a while, though, one just accepts it and moves on, enjoying the story Shusterman lays out.

Unwind features three kids who are due to undergo the unwinding process. Connor Lassiter has trouble thinking through his actions and controlling his temper, causing his fed-up parents to decide to have him unwound. Risa Ward is a ward of the state. She’s been living in a state home, working hard to distinguish herself as a pianist, but she’s just not flawless enough to be worth saving, and is scheduled to be sent off to “harvest camp” in order to keep orphanage costs low. Lev Calder is a “tithe,” who was brought up by his parents and church to believe that his eventual unwinding is somehow a holy thing. Circumstances bring the three together, tear them apart, and bring them together again, with no one remaining unchanged.

While the plot of Unwind is certainly fast-paced and frequently surprising, the best thing about it is the way in which the characters are developed. At first, Connor’s lack of foresight and impulse control is maddening. He runs away to avoid being sent to harvest camp, but leaves his cell phone on, making him easy to track. He reacts to a baby left on a doorstep without thinking, saddling him and his companions with an infant they don’t have the resources to care for. In short, he’s more like a typical teen than a typical hero. Very gradually, and with the help from the more logical Risa, Connor evolves. He learns to keep his cool and discovers a talent for fixing things, be they mechanical or societal in nature. He becomes a leader, a genuine hero, and his progress is entirely believable.

Lev also changes a great deal. The youngest of the three, he’s only thirteen, and has spent his whole life being indoctrinated in certain beliefs. When Connor impulsively saves him from his “glorious fate,” Lev is not grateful at all, and turns Connor and Risa in at the first available opportunity. When he realizes that not even his pastor believes that what his family is doing is right, Lev’s world is thrown into turmoil. Separated now from Connor and Risa, he travels on his own, quickly becoming street-wise and meeting up with CyFi, a smart but troubled teen who once received a partial brain transplant from an unwind and is now contending with strange impulses from that other kid. Thrust into the harsh world with no preparation, Lev hardens quickly and learns to think for himself. Through learning of sin and evil, he becomes a much better person than he ever was before.

Risa doesn’t change as dramatically as the others, since she was always level-headed and cognizant of her possible fate. With her, the fact that she’s begun to allow herself to finally hope is what’s significant. I’m fond of her characterization in general, though, especially that she’s capable, competent, and so frequently the voice of reason. Her ability to keep a cool head during medical emergencies is also welcome.

Ultimately, while I could not completely suspend my disbelief in order to buy into the premise of this dystopic future world, I still liked Unwind a great deal. Even though Shusterman makes some Important Points, his approach is still balanced, as he questions whether it’s fair to bring unwanted children into the world in the first place even while his characters struggle so very hard for the right to live. Lastly, I must commend him for a positively chilling depiction of the unwinding process. That will seriously stick with me for a long time.

In conclusion, Unwind is good. Go read it. And Shusterman, get cracking on that sequel (Unwholly, TBA).

Filed Under: Books, Sci-Fi, YA Tagged With:
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