Lovely British children's books about a family of eccentrics. The mom is an absent-minded painter who named her children after paint colors, the hilariously insensitive father is nearly entirely absent, and the four kids are up to assorted hijinks involving keeping hamsters in pockets, stowing away to Italy, and searching for Saffron's inheritance, a missing stone angel.

A plot description doesn't do these books justice. McKay is one of those writers (mostly British, in my experience) who writes short, seemingly simple books about ordinary life in which every sentence is perfect, scattered details build to hilarious comic set pieces, and can turn on a dime between laughter and tears because the characters and their emotions seem so genuine. Light but not shallow.

Saffy's Angel

Indigo's Star

Sequel to Night Gate, in which, you may recall, I was fascinated by the twelve-year-old heroine's stirrings-of-first-love relationship with Billy Thunder, her dog who turns into an attractive teenage boy when they go to fantasyland together to try to wake her mother from a coma.

Now back in the real world, it turns out that Rage's mom briefly rallied, but is now worse than ever. Oops. To Rage's sorrow, Billy Thunder is a dog again. For the first half of the novel, Rage has brief dreams of fantasyland, but much of the action involves her battle and then friendship with a troubled bully from her school, Logan. A human rival for Billy Thunder, I thought.

But when she finally confides her magical adventures to Logan, he becomes fascinated - even a bit obsessed - with her descriptions of Elle, her dog who became a beautiful blonde girl. For the rest of the book, she and Logan have somewhat random fantasyland adventures while Rage longs for Billy Thunder and Logan longs for Elle. This is the first novel I've ever read in which the romantic quadrangle consists of two humans and two transformed dogs.

A third book was promised, but that was seven years ago.

Winter Door

New Zealand fantasy and children’s/YA author Margaret Mahy has died at the age of 76.

A wonderful prose stylist and creator of atmosphere, with books that turn on a dime from slyly funny to deeply moving, a master of twisty plots who was also brilliant at sketching vivid characters in a very few words, she is one of the very few writers whom I would compare to Diana Wynne Jones. Their books read very differently, but both had similar virtues as writers. Both were true originals. Their books meant the world to me, and I regret that I never got to meet either of them in person.

If you have never read Mahy, I offer a sampling of possibilities below. She wrote the kind of children’s books which are just as rewarding to adults, with sparkling surfaces and genuine depth. Unusually, she wrote both fantasy and realistic fiction, but her realistic novels read a bit like fantasy, full of mysteries and the sense of wonder. She’s also very good with families; unlike Jones’, they tend to have problems but generally be loving and functional.

Mahy was extremely prolific. I haven’t read any of her books for very young children, nor have I read all of her books for older kids and teenagers. What I have below is just a sampling.

I am very sad that most of her books appear to be out of print in America. However, if you’re in the USA, used editions are very easily obtainable and inexpensive. I have linked to those.

The Changeover. Probably Mahy’s best-known book, a fabulous contemporary fantasy. When Laura Chant’s little brother falls deathly ill due to a curse by an evil sorcerer, she teams up with Sorenson “Sorry” Carlisle, school weirdo and witch, who can help her unlock her own powers. This is one teen romance that really works for me, with discreet sensuality and witty banter. The awakening of Laura’s powers is tied to the awakening of her maturity and sexuality – a theme which Mahy uses a couple times, and always well. Very atmospheric and well-characterized.

Catalogue of the Universe. Gorgeous mainstream novel about the romance and friendship between a troubled popular girl and a brilliant boy; not remotely what you’d expect from that synopsis, though. It’s beautifully written, emotionally perceptive, and what I’d point first when I said that Mahy’s mainstream novels have as much sense of wonder as her fantasy. It reminds me a little bit of Ursula Le Guin’s wonderful, overlooked Very Far Away from Anywhere Else.

Here's a post by Gwenda Bond which does a way better job of discussing the two books above; no spoilers.

The Tricksters. Fascinating, sophisticated, subtle, and very, very weird. 17-year-old Harry (a girl) is writing a terrible, id-vortex novel, full of lush descriptions and barely subtextual sexuality. Three mysterious men show up at her family’s summer home, to shake up everyone’s lives and shake loose some family secrets. Are they ghosts? Characters from her novel? Something else entirely?

Memory. I cannot believe I am recommending a novel in which a troubled teenage boy meets an old woman with Alzheimer’s. It sounds like a classic problem novel, and depressing to boot. But it isn’t, it isn’t, and it’s actually very good – a character study and a story about a relationship, not a story about issues.

The Haunting. This frightening, penetrating tale concerns Barney Palmer, who discovers that one person in each generation of his family has had supernatural powers; has he inherited this dreaded curse? Not as complex as some of her other books, but very atmospheric and spooky, with a nicely unpredictable plot.

The Other Side of Silence. A mainstream novel about a large, quirky, brilliant family, narrated by Hero, the daughter who doesn’t speak. Dark in parts, but not depressing; the family has problems but also a lot of strengths. This one is all about character growth and self-knowledge, and I loved the ending revelation about Hero’s silence.

Underrunners. When he wants to forget about his life, Tris visits the underrunners, the vast network of underground tunnels near his home. It's a fantasy world he tells no one about--until he meets Winola, whose escape from the Children's Home makes her Tris's perfect partner. Then they discover someone is watching them--suddenly their imaginary adventure turns horrifyingly real. It sounds like a suspense thriller with a helping of social issues, and it sort of is. But it’s also spookily poetic and full of mythic resonance. It reminds me a bit of Night of the Hunter, a thriller about children in danger that plays out like an old fairytale.

Please discuss any of Mahy’s novels here, including ones I didn't mention. Spoilers fine if they’re clearly marked in the subject heading.

Akata Witch is a children’s fantasy novel set in a marvelously vivid modern Nigeria, in which a society of magical Leopard People operates out of sight of the Lamb People, which is to say, us.

Twelve-year-old Sunny is already used to living in two worlds, as she’s both Nigerian and American, and a black person who looks white due to being an albino. So when she discovers that she’s a free agent Leopard Person – born with magical powers, but without magical parents – it’s all part of her cultural between-ness. Both that and her albinism turn out to be key to her powers: Leopard People who are physically disabled or non-neurotypical are often extra-powerful, with magical abilities which relate to, but do not erase, their disabilities. (This trope is hugely controversial, so I’ll just say that I thought it was sensitively handled. Your mileage may vary.)

Sunny is initiated into the world of the Leopard People, learning to summon her spirit face and make an invisibility spell from a sheep’s head (she does this quite openly in her kitchen, and feeds the leftovers to her family as soup), and rewarded for knowledge gained by showers of magical coins and friendly magical insect companions. The story ambles along episodically, as Sunny learns the ways of the Leopard People, makes friends, and tries to balance her new magical life with the need to stay in school and not let her family find out. One of my favorite parts of the book is the excerpts from a magical how-to book Sunny reads, written by a snarky, superior Leopard Person who looks down from a considerable height upon both Lamb People and free agents.

At a somewhat late point, she is told that she and her buddies need to stop a serial child-killer; they don’t do much about it until they are abruptly told that the time is right, and then they hastily confront him in a battle which, while dramatic, was too rushed to feel truly climactic. I could have done without that whole storyline. I was much more interested in seeing Sunny poke around her strange new world, being traumatized by witnessing bizarre Leopard People duels and conscientiously praising her pet magic wasp’s artistic creations lest it get so disappointed in her as to commit melodramatic suicide before her eyes, as magical wasps are apparently wont to do.

I also would have liked to have seen more attention paid to Sunny’s family. I couldn’t tell from her narrative whether the level of corporal punishment tipped over into abuse or not, but the situation with her father seemed so bad, emotionally if nothing else, that I wanted it to be dealt with more than it ever was. That and the serial killer stoyline were tonally different from the magical dangers in the rest of the story in a way that never quite meshed.

This is the third book I’ve read by Okorafor. It has many of the same virtues of The Shadow Speaker (my favorite so far) and Zahrah the Windseeker: a playful sense of humor, a fantastic sense of place, and a packed-to-the-brim sense of invention. It also shares the flaw of a rushed and poorly set up climax. Her worlds and their funny, clever details are fantastic; her prose and plotting don’t reach the same heights. (I read a little bit of her adult novel Who Fears Death, before setting it aside for a time when I’m more steeled for depressing content, and the prose in that much more was much more impressive.) Akata Witch is fun but the worldbuilding, while charming, didn’t feel as deep as it did in her more profoundly transformed settings.

Akata Witch

Things Corinna Stonewall likes:

1. Power.

2. Secrets.

3. Rain.

4. Lurking in cold, damp, pitch-black cellars.

Things Corinna Stonewall doesn't like:

1. Sunlight.

2. People.

Corinna is a Folk Keeper, assigned to live in a cellar and feed, ward off, and placate the hungry, spiteful, dangerous Folk, who otherwise will eat the animals and destroy the crops. An orphan, at age eleven she decided that she was sick of doing boring housework, and so cut her hair, disguised herself as a boy, and learned to be a Folk Keeper. She has spent five years lurking in a cellar. Then she gets taken to a new estate overlooking the ocean, where everything changes...

This was GREAT. The language is gorgeous, Corinna's voice and character are prickly and funny and wonderful, the characters are all vivid, and the story is full of twists and cleverly used folklore motifs. I saw the most important surprise coming, but didn't catch about three others.

If you liked Billingsley's Chime, you will almost certainly like this. It has some similar motifs and virtues, but is shorter, simpler, and less dark.

The Folk Keeper

It's not too late to sponsor me for this read-a-thon! Click on the "read-a-thon" tag for details.

Sponsored by pameladean and slrose.

A boy named David reads an ad in a newspaper, asking for boys between the ages of eight and eleven to build a spaceship, from materials they happen to have around and without adult help, for an exciting mission to outer space. David and his friend Chuck oblige, and are selected for the mission by the peculiar neighbor Mr. Bass, who explains that he is a mushroom person who grew from a spore and that he senses that his people, on the unknown child-sized planet Basilicum X, are in need of help. He helps them space-proof their ship and suggests that they bring an animal mascot, and off they go.

The mushroom people are indeed in need of help, but luckily (or was it only luck?) one of the items Chuck and David brought with them is exactly what they need. Unlike many children’s fantasies of this time period, the conclusion does not involve a mind-wipe, the suggestion that it was all a dream, or anything of that nature.

This is a children’s classic from 1954. This is my first time reading it, which is too bad. I enjoyed it as an adult, but I would have loved it at age eight or so. It precisely captures a particular type of child’s adventure, when you and your best friend equip a cardboard box with provisions for a journey, and take off for outer space. (Or Fairyland, or Narnia.) The details of the mushroom planet are very much like something a child might imagine, as is the solution to the mushroom people’s problem – a child’s idea given an adult’s scientific gloss.

Amusingly, all the adults are happy to support David and Chuck’s expedition, because (the reader understands) they assume the boys will just be camping out overnight. David doesn’t realize this, and is both pleased and baffled that his mother doesn’t object to his journey into space.

The language is very old-fashioned (“Gee whillikers!”), and so is the whole idea of scattering tons of accurate scientific details amidst the fantasy, clearly with a didactic intent. (In the sense of teaching, not of preaching.) I enjoyed learning new things from books when I was a kid, and I enjoyed reading this book, but I’m surprised that it’s still in print. The whole idea of scattering bits of useful or interesting knowledge into children's books is something that seems to have gone way, way out of fashion.

When I opened my copy, purchased at a used bookshop, I found that one of my SAT students had written her name on the inside cover! It was a coincidence (or was it?) that fit right in with the off-kilter, quirky spirit of the book.

The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet

There's been tons of discussion of diversity in children's and young adult literature, but I'd like to take it to a more personal level:

When you were a child and teenager, or now, if you're currently a teenager, did you see characters like yourself in the books you read? Do you see characters like yourself now? Did they only appear in limited circumstances, like only as villains, as sidekicks but not heroes, in novels about being persecuted and oppressed but not in more lighthearted fare, only as certain character types, etc? Did it matter to you when you did, or if you didn't?

By "like yourself," I'm thinking of matters of both identity and experience: characters of your race, your nationality, your gender, your sexual orientation, your experiences, etc.

I think you're all quite familiar with my feelings on the matter. I have ranted at great length about how discouraging it was, when I was a teenager, to keep coming across the "trauma destroys you forever" and "people with mental illnesses are doomed" tropes, and how encouraging and helpful it was to later encounter books like Deerskin and Mirror Dance, which said just the opposite. And while it didn't have a serious negative impact on my life that most books I read with Jewish characters were about the Holocaust or other Very Serious Jewish Issues, to this day I erupt in squeals of joy when I encounter a non-stereotyped Jewish character in a non-issue book.

On the flip side, I can think of many, many male-female romances, whether part of genre romance or just part of the story, which I read with great enjoyment. I can only imagine how I would feel if, growing up, I never ever found a book which had a romance of the sort I was actually having or wanted to have. But if I hadn't been straight, that would be the case. The only lesbians I encountered in fiction, up until I was at least a senior in high school, were Agatha Christie's "spinsters," whom I didn't recognize as such until much later, and the woman who traumatizes the straight heroine with a drunken pass in Madeleine L'Engle's A House Like A Lotus.

So you know how I feel. But I'm wondering: how do you feel? What was and is your experience?

These will be brief, as I read them both ages ago and only now realized that I never got around to reviewing them.

True Meaning of Smekday, The is a marvelous and very funny science fiction comedy in which eleven-year-old Gratuity "Tip" Tucci tells the story of how Earth was colonized by aliens, and she ended up traveling cross-country in search of her mother in a flying car called Slushious, in the company of a conflicted alien named J. Lo.

This book has all sorts of elements which I normally hate, from cutesy pop culture references to heavy-handed messages ("colonialism is bad") to mocking Disneyland (easy target). Amazingly, I loved it anyway. It's very, very, very funny, the messages are on-target, and Tip is an extremely likable heroine, if a tad mature for eleven. There are some comic strips incorporated which tell the history of the aliens, and I nearly died laughing reading them.

I also liked that Tip is biracial (African-American/Italian) and it comes up believably, but that's not the subject of the story. Though I have to register my usual annoyance that while she is accurately depicted in the interior illustrations, she's not present on the cover. Seriously, would it kill publishers to occasionally depict people of color on the covers of books in which they are the protagonists?

I think anyone over about eight could appreciate this one, if their reading level is up to it.

Fat Vampire: A Never Coming of Age Story is a young adult novel, definitely not appropriate for young children, about a fat geeky teenage boy, Doug, who becomes the world's least glamorous vampire. It's nowhere near as assured or successful as Smekday.

It alternates narratives between Doug and Senjal, an Indian exchange student with an internet addiction. Doug's narration is dead-on as a geeky teenage boy. Senjal is potentially interesting but comes across more as a narrative construct than a flesh-and-blood character. But I was enjoying it, mostly for Doug's narration, until, at the two-thirds mark, the entire thing falls apart into a mess of preachiness and WTF.

( Read more... )

Cat Chant is a quiet, passive boy whose selfish, bossy sister Gwendolyn is a witch. When they’re orphaned in a boating accident, Gwendolyn quickly arranges life to her satisfaction, getting magic lessons from locals and finally getting herself and Cat taken in by the great enchanter, Chrestomanci, an elegant man with an endless selection of exquisite outfits. To Gwendolyn’s fury, no one at Chrestomanci Castle appreciates her wonderfulness, so she sets about turning the place upside down. Cat, whose approach to life is mostly duck-and-cover, ducks and covers until suddenly he can’t any more, and is forced to take action.

That’s about all I can say about the plot without ruining the twists. (You can probably guess that there’s more to Cat than meets the eye. But you probably won’t guess the exact plot turn which forces Cat from his usual place as an onlooker into a mover and shaker.)

Diana Wynne Jones is great at hilariously animated inanimate objects, and the weakly waving gingerbread men and Julia’s cowardly tin soldiers are some of my favorites of those. The shift in Gwendolyn’s pranks from harmless and funny to disturbing and awful is mirrored in the tone of the book – one minute you’re laughing, and the next you don’t want to look over your shoulder. The careful set-up of a number of plot points gets a marvelous pay-off when Cat ends up with something like five awful fates hanging over his head, all set to occur sequentially over the course of a weekend.

But what makes this book special to me isn’t so much the comedy, though it’s very funny, or the plotting, which is very well-done, as the complicated relationship between Cat and Gwendolyn, and the emotional honesty of Cat’s slow growth from a boy who won’t or can’t understand most of what’s going on in his life, to a boy who begins to step up and take responsibility for things he’d rather not even think about, let alone deal with.

Feel free to put spoilers in comments.

The Chronicles of Chrestomanci, Volume 1: Charmed Life / The Lives of Christopher Chant

This might have been the first book I ever read by Diana Wynne Jones.

I know that the edition I read, and still own, was from the MagicQuest line, which was much better than it sounds, a line of fantasy novels for children and teenagers, not connected to each other and selected for quality. Jane Yolen had a rather minor novel, The Magic Three of Solatia; Peter Dickinson had Tulku (I have never really enjoyed Dickinson, though I respect his craft and ambition), and Jones also had The Magicians of Caprona, a wacky, surrealistic retelling of Romeo and Juliet in an alternate Italy, with Punch and Judy playing a major role. Probably the best book in the line - and it was an excellent line - was Elizabeth Marie Pope's The Perilous Gard.

Did anyone else read these? I have always been curious about Paul Fisher, whose novels were somewhat standard fantasy made notable by intense, dreamlike atmosphere. I have never seen his name anywhere else.

The Power of Three uses a number of standard elements of fantasy - magic Gifts, shapeshifting, curses, elves (sort of), giants (very sort of) - but gives them a whole series of unique twists. It also has one of the very few prologues which is actually worth reading, in which a girl (who later becomes the mother of the protagonists) watches in horror as her brother kills a shapeshifter boy to get his golden collar. It comes with a curse...

When the main story picks up, about fifteen years later, it's from the point of view of Gair, the oldest child of three and the only one without a magic Gift. He's from one of the three cultures living on the moor, all of which simply call themselves people. His people sometimes have magic gifts, but otherwise their strangeness is slipped in piecemeal. I remember reading it and only very slowly realizing that no, Gair's people are not just magical people, they're not what I would call humans. This is very, very well-done, and his culture is convincingly and fascinatingly odd.

The other people are what Gair's folk call Dorigs, who live underwater and shapeshift, and Giants, who are... us. All three are on a collision course, if not outright at war, but begin meeting and interacting with each other halfway through. (Warning: One of the human characters, who turns out to be quite likable and heroic, is fat, unhappy about being fat, and has others thinking that being fat is unattractive.) The lessons they learn are unsurprising but, again, well-done and with unexpected details.

A plot description doesn't capture the atmosphere of the book, which is alternately mythic, magical, and down to earth and funny. It's not one of Jones's best books, but it's well worth reading. I'm very fond of it.

Feel free to put spoilers in comments.

Power of Three