Book Barn

[rachelmanija]

I went to the Book Barn in Niantic, CT: three locations, two goats and three cats spotted (one of which licked and two of which bit me), and a very large book haul.



Click to enlarge.

Thoughts on any of the books?

Comments

[coffeeandink]

In Great Waters is a complex, unsentimental, unsparing look at mermaids with elegant prose; I remember finding the ending somewhat anticlimactic, but the book still worth it.

Demon Pig! I have not read this or The Pig, the Prince, and the Unicorn in decades, and have no idea how they stand up, but I was very fond of the pair as a teen.

My mother had most of the Rabbi Small books and I read a bunch of them as a teen, but again, I don't know how well they'll stand up. They are probably a pretty decent representation of (religiously) Conservative and (politically) liberal American Jewish congregations of the time period, or at least they matched my experience pretty well.

I have read and liked other books by Erin Bow and Robert Newman, but not the particular ones you have.

[rachelmanija]

What were the other Erin Bow and Robert Newman books you liked?

[coffeeandink]

For Erin Bow, the duology The Scorpion Rules/The Swan Riders -- it has some fascinating looks at AI and ethics and political struggle, and I have read it recently enough to recommend it with confidence!

For Robert Newman, I was very fond of Merlin's Mistake when I was a kid -- it's a YA fantasy about a squire on an adventure, I think, but I don't remember the details.

[hippogriff13]

Was that the one about a kid--I think his name was Tertius--whom Merlin was trying to teach magic (or something) but somehow instead wound up accidentally imbuing with all kinds of twentieth-century scientific and technological knowledge, which was largely useless (at best) for the era he was actually living in? As I recall, the viewpoint character was a more "normal" Arthurian-era kid who becomes friends with Tertius while they're trying to find some way to use Tertius's anachronistic knowledge to deal with some current problem the Knights of the Round Table are attempting to solve.

[coffeeandink]

Yes, I think so. There's also a sequel called The Testing of Tertius, but I'm not sure I ever knew about it as a kid.

[skygiants]

I also loved every other Erin Bow book that I read but have not got round to this one yet, so I'm very stoked to hear your thoughts on it!