A Quokka Dreeds its Weird

This book, the first in a 7-book middle-grade series, was recommended to me by a customer who wanted to buy A Little Princess for her daughters who had gotten interested in it after reading this book.

Tilly Pages lives in her grandparents' home above their bookshop, as her mother vanished without a trace shortly after she was born. She discovers that she and her grandparents (and her mother) are bookwanderers - able to step into the pages of books and interact with the characters. (She only ever explores out-of-copyright books due to real life copyright laws.) Book characters can also sometimes step out of their books and interact with bookwanderers in the real world - Tilly discovered her gift when she met Anne Shirley and Alice from Wonderland.

This is a whole lot of fun, and also has a truly amazing twist. ( Read more... )

I look forward to reading the next book, which looks like it will center around fairytales.

A sort of long-form picture book for children and adults, about a shipwrecked father and son who wash up on a lost island, Dinotopia, where humans live in harmony with intelligent dinosaurs. The story is about how father and son integrate into the culture, with the father exploring while the son trains to become a quetzalcoatlus rider.

I'd seen art from Dinotopia but I never actually read the book. The book is great! The story is solid, the world is really well thought out, and the art is spectacular. All together, it takes you on a marvelous journey that you never want to end, and makes you feel like you're really there. The anniversary edition has an afterword by Gurney where he talks about wanting to write a narrative that isn't based on conflict, and a utopia that isn't sentimental or preachy. Though the art is what makes it sing, the writing is good too and he succeeds in his aims.

I was so happy to read this book, which I have sold repeatedly in my shop. And! There's three more books! I have ordered them and look forward to exploring Dinotopia some more.

This is not one book about a particularly unlucky immortal, but four books in a series of short, easy-read middle-grade novels about kids surviving disasters. I bought them because I needed to fill a particular ecological niche in my children's books, which was easy-read middle grade novels which 1) would appeal to boys as well as girls, 2) are not fantasy, 3) are not Hatchet or Wimpy Kid.

I read one to see what they were like and was pleasantly surprised by how much fun it was. I ended up reading three more for sheer enjoyment and will no doubt work my way through the entire series. I'm not saying they're great literature, but they are A+ at leaning into their premises - they promise a kid surviving a disaster, and they give you a kid surviving a disaster - and they are much better than they need to be.

I particularly like how each one features both a disaster and some personal problem, and how the personal problem ties into the disaster but in a non-obvious way. My favorite in this line is that the hero flees Pompeii with his father not because of Vesuvius, but because they're runaway slaves - and then goes back to try to warn the city because his dad's former (now deceased) owner was basically an early scientist and so his dad recognized the signs of an impending eruption. But I also enjoyed the Japanese-American boy using his recently-dead father's stories from the Air Force to help hum survive the tsunami, the American Revolution kid worrying about the young woman slave and her toddler that he left behind, and the medieval peasant girl trying to retrieve her church's stolen chalice from a corrupt sheriff.

The historical details are pretty good, the action is exciting, and while the kids and the people they love the most all survive and get reasonably happy endings and there's nothing too graphic, Tarshis doesn't pull many punches within those constraints. The tsunami aftermath is pretty brutal, and she's very clear that the American Revolution meant freedom for only a very limited subset of Americans. There's an afterword to the plague book which says she got a lot of requests for it, and she thinks it's because of covid. She suggest that kids who lived though covid write about it for posterity.









I regret that the heroine is not running away from the bubonic plague while looking over her shoulder to see if it's chasing her.

In case you're wondering, this is a kinkajou. They are related to raccoons, ringtails, coatimundis, and cacomistles.

This 1967 animal story concerns a kinkajou who starts his life in Mexico, where he gets captured at a young age because he got too caught up in eating a honeycomb. He becomes the pet of a Mexican boy, Carlos, but he's too good at escaping from his cage and steals honeycombs from a neighbor's bees. Carlos's parents tell him he has to get rid of his pet. Luckily, Carlos is able to pass him on to an American boy, Timothy, who's visiting Mexico with his father.

Timothy's mother is dead and his father's job requires him to travel a lot, so Timothy spends most of his life in boarding schools and is lonely. Because his father understands this, he lets Timothy keep the kinkajou, who he names Benny. But Benny's tendency to wreak havoc and escape starts causing Timothy the same sorts of problems he caused Carlos - and the boarding school doesn't allow pets...

This is a very sweet, well-observed, naturalistic animal story, with the point of view shifting between that of Benny and the humans around him. It becomes genuinely suspenseful at a certain point, when I became very invested in Benny and Timothy getting to stay together. (Spoiler: they do!)

For a white guy writing in 1967, it's blessedly non-racist; there's some mild of-the-times-ness but Carlos and his parents are pretty similar to Timothy and his father, and the Mexicans are all depicted as just normal people. Apart from the Mexican sections, it's set in the Santa Barbara area, where I used to live, and which apart from the Kinsey Milhone series, is a place I rarely see depicted in fiction. It was fascinating to see what it was like in the late sixties (a lot less developed, for one.) It has very nice illustrations, too.

( Read more... )

A Kinkajou on the Town is thoroughly out of print, but you can download a pdf - complete with illustrations - from Anna's Archive.

I bought this book in the library book sale, based on a logline about orphans surviving on an mysterious island. Little did I know what I was in for.

I HATED this book. It's not a realistic or even unrealistic survival story, it's a preachy allegory that doesn't even make sense on its own terms AND has unnecessary plotlines that seem set up only to frustrate the reader by going nowhere AND has a bad message AND appears to advocate letting toddlers use filleting knives.

There are nine children on the island. There are always nine children on the island. Every year, an otherwise empty boat arrives with a toddler. The toddler gets off the boat. The oldest child on the island gets in the boat, and the boat takes off by itself. That child is never seen again. And so the cycle continues.

The kids have no idea why this is happening, but regard it as a normal fact of life and have been told that if a child ever refuses to get on the boat, the sky will fall. Who told them this? Older kids. Who told those kids? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The book opens with the arrival of a new toddler, Ess, who speaks in obnoxious phonetic baby talk, "Whah dis?" and "Ess sooze" (shoes). I HATE baby talk.

Deen, the oldest child, gets in the boat over the tearful protests of the next-oldest child, Jinny.  Now Jinny has lost her best friend and is stuck as the primary caretaker for Ess. Lucky for Ess, the island is a paradise. Food is extremely easy to get, there are bees but they don't sting, there are snakes but they don't bite, the sunrises depict beautiful flowers opening and stuff like that, and if you jump off the cliffs a gentle wind will blow you back. None of the kids ever get sick or hurt, except for very minor scrapes.

So clearly, we're dealing with either Heaven or a constructed environment. At first, all signs point to "constructed environment." There's a library of real books from our world, and Jinny marvels over such strange things as "movies" and "candy."

None of the kids have any idea what's off the island or if the books are describing real things, because they all arrived when they were so young that they couldn't explain anything, and by the time they're old enough to talk coherently, they don't remember anything before their arrival.

( Minor spoiler )

This is why I kept reading - I was curious WTF was going on with the island and why. Virtual reality? A carefully maintained super-playground? A long-term science experiment? A generation ship? This is all a dream while Jinny's in a coma in the real world?

The kids have very limited knowledge about the world, as they all arrived as toddlers and were taught by preteen kids who were also taught by preteen kids. So a lot of the names for things are ones they made up, because they don't know what the real names are. (This is why their names are all spelled oddly.) Sometimes I liked this, like "jellyblobs" for sea anemones. Other times I did not like it, like "wishing" for peeing/pooping, and the toilet being a "wish cabin" BARF FOREVER into the wish basin.

This also fails to have a point. In books like Piranesi or The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents, we see how specific people construct knowledge in different ways depending on who they are and what they have to draw from. In Orphan Island, it's all just cute or twee and not drawn from anything specific beyond not knowing how to spell.

But all is not well in cutesy paradise. Jinny is resentful over being stuck with Ess, worried that Ess will get hurt, and doesn't want to get in a boat and sail off to somewhere totally unknown and possibly to her death. None of the other children think those are reasonable concerns for Jinny to have, and everything in the narrative supports the other kids.

When Jinny tries to teach Ess the things the older kids are supposed to teach their toddler charges, Ess doesn't seem to learn them very well, Jinny gets impatient, and the other kids lecture Jinny on how it's very important that Ess learn and Jinny needs to teach her better. (Note that Jinny is the oldest kid, and she's like eleven. In fact, she comes across as the youngest short of Ess, because everyone else is smarter and more competent and calmer than her.)

I hesitate to say that I have a literal trigger for anything in literature, but if I do, it's when a character is criticized or punished or mocked for being unable to do something when they've never been taught how to do it and there's no reason why they should know how to do it, and the narrative seems to think this is fine. (I don't mind if the narrative clearly thinks this is unfair.) How is Jinny supposed to teach Ess how to read? She clearly has no idea. The other kids, disgusted with her inability to do so, take over and successfully teach Ess to read, but we don't know how they do it because it happens off page.

Similarly, Jinny fails at teaching Ess how to swim, largely because she's worried that toddler Ess could drown. The other kids tell her that's impossible, and one of them tosses Ess in the ocean. This successfully teaches her how to swim!

Jinny is worried that if she tries to teach Ess to scale and gut a fish with a sharp filleting knife, she might cut herself. Remember, Ess is a LITERAL TODDLER who talks like "Dinny, pease stay?" The other kids tell Jinny she's being overprotective and to let Ess use the knife. Of course, Ess is fine.

The lessons are so bad here that I started to feel like I was being gaslit by a book. Okay, sure, in this specific situation the kids are clearly being protected by something and it does seem impossible for them to get hurt, not to mention that toddlers are somehow magically capable of the physical coordination to SCALE AND GUT A FISH, so Jinny actually is being overprotective, buuuuut...

If this was black comedy, I would probably like it. But it's not, and Jinny is presented as being clearly in the wrong. That's not to say that I like Jinny. I actually couldn't stand her. I just hated the other kids even more. Needless to say, none of the characters came across as actual kids.

Oh and also Jinny is explicitly being condescended to and lied to by the other kids - at one point they explain to her that her lost bestie Deen, who she'd thought was an advocate of letting her do things her own way, had secretly told them that the key to smooth relations with Jinny was to let her THINK she was getting her own way, but actually to manipulate her so she only thought that was true UGH UGH UGH.

ANYWAY. So what's up with these boats? Let's leave aside the possible science fiction explanations and look at it as allegory. The children arrive when they're very young and know and remember nothing. They're cared for by others. When they're older but just before they hit puberty, they get in them again and sail away. The allegory seems like the arrival is birth, and the departure is leaving the golden, protected, beautiful land of childhood behind and entering into the uncharted and scary waters of adolescence.

But that is not a good allegory for adolescence. (Even apart from very few people thinking of their childhoods as perfection even if they were happy!) The children have no idea where they're going or whether they'll ever see any of their friends again or even if they'll survive. Adolescence is kind of an unknown, but not to that extent. You're still allowed to see your younger friends! The departure feels much more like an allegory for death.

So is Jinny's desire to not get on the boat an allegory for a child afraid of becoming a teenager? Or is it an allegory for a person refusing to face death? This is a children's book, mind, so if it's the latter that's a little disturbing.

Orphan Island feels like a preachy, message-y book. But what's the message? Well...

( Are you fucking SERIOUS )

In conclusion, fuck the baby talk, fuck the misspelled names, and fuck wishes that come out of your ass.

My favorite review from Goodreads: "We listened to this on audiobook, and upon completion my children wanted to stop the vehicle and put the discs under the car and run them over. [...]

We ranted for at least a half an hour. We woke up the next morning and one of my son's first words were, "I'm still angry about the book."

Eleven-year-old Rob loves sitting in the cherry tree in his front yard, where he can spit cherry pits at the bedroom window belonging to Mrs. Calloway, the world's worst neighbor, and avoid the madhouse his home has become in the runup to his older sister's wedding. Then he sees a pair of hands shove Mrs. Calloway out the window to her death! But when he tries to tell people, nobody listens or believes him. Except the murderer...

Roberts' first book is basically Rear Window for pre-teens. I read this when I was kid and remember finding it very suspenseful. It still is once it gets going. The beginning/middle is a nicely written and amusing but fairly standard middle-grade comedy/mystery, with some implausibilities in terms of how impossible it is to get anyone to even let Rob finish a sentence when they know he saw Mrs. Calloway fall to her (rather gruesome) death. But once the murderer gets serious about getting rid of Rob, it becomes a cracking thriller that had me staying up late to finish it.

Content notes: One use of the r-word, the murder is unexpectedly disturbing/graphic for a middle-grade thriller, cats are injured/in danger (but they recover and are fine), a whole lot of spiders.

The Kindle version with the awful cover has been censored. The original book had the cat named S.O.B. This version names it Sonny, and cuts the explanation for the cat's name. S.O.B. is a major character, so it wouldn't surprise me if other elements of the book were altered too. Buy a used copy of the original book instead.

After reading Thursday's Children and Listen to the Nightengale, I inspected my bookcases and pulled out any books featuring ballet that I had not yet read. Hence, Beginner's Luck.

Three orphan siblings living in gloomy obscurity with an unfriendly aunt who hates performing arts discover that their father was an actor, their mother was a dancer, and they have a living aunt who's an actress. An absurd pile-up of wild coincidences that reminded me of the immortal line "And then the hand of fate stepped in" enables them to start a new life with a pantomime troupe.

There are definite echoes of Ballet Shoes. The oldest, Victoria, starts with no particular ambitions but is a competent dancer and it's hinted may be a good actress, the middle, Jenny, is a very talented ballerina and a small diva, and the youngest, James, is a hilarious child prone to impromptu recitals of a weird poem about a venerable ancestor, getting rolled up in a carpet and smuggled aboard a train, and getting a bear mask stuck on his head.



The pantomime troupe elements are fun but not given anything like the depth or details of anything by Godden or Streatfeild. But it's a very charming and funny in that particular style of 1930s-1950s British children's literature, and if you like that generally you will like this. It's very thoroughly out of print but I see affordable copies in online bookstores.

Oriel Malet was the pen name of Lady Auriel Rosemary Malet Vaughan (!) who had a thirty-year friendship with the much older Daphne du Maurier, who she met at a party, and published a volume of their correspondence. She also wrote novels. If this is a good sample, they were extremely charming and I would like to read more of them.

The Goodreads reviews failed to disambiguate this book from a different one with the same title, to hilarious effect. A gentle book--One of my favorite books from childhood, which I enjoyed rereading this week... A struggle rages in his soul between the way he was taught in the Catholic monastery, and the pleasure of sin that are assailing his flesh.

It seems I had always woken up in the morning with leaves and bits of grass in my toes and under my sheets as if I'd been a ghost wandering the countryside at night. But maybe not. Maybe it wasn't until that summer my mother visited us when she was forever weaving honeysuckle wreaths, and I followed her out into the backwoods that night after dinner.

Zoe's mother has the 1980s/1990s YA mother mental illness that makes moms abandon their children, and so she leaves Zoe with her grandparents when Zoe is four. Zoe's grandparents refurbish an old playhouse once used by her mother, and her mother drops in periodically to do things like show her the old gravestone inscribed with "Zoe," which narrator-Zoe was named for.

Our Zoe meets Zoe Louise in the playhouse, when they're both four years old. Zoe is too young to realize that Zoe Louise is a ghost, and Zoe's grandparents assume she's Zoe's imaginary friend. They become close friends, and it's several years before Zoe starts noticing that while she grows older, Zoe Louise doesn't. For Zoe Louise, it's always the same day - her birthday, when her father is going to give her a pony. Zoe realizes that as Zoe Louise is a stuck-in-time ghost in her life, she is a bouncing-around-in-time ghost in Zoe Louise's life.

But while Zoe Louise's time doesn't change, Zoe Louise herself begins to change in terrifying ways...

This is a short book that feels almost epic, despite its tight focus on one house and two girls in two times. The way the timeslip works has its own internal logic that makes it feel real, but is strange enough to also feel eerie and numinous. The scary aspects would have scared the living daylights out of me had I read this as a child, and were still pretty scary now. The relationship between the girls, and between Zoe and her mother, intersect in odd ways that have the strangeness of real relationships and real emotions.

Out of print, but you can get used copies for cheap. I'm surprised this hasn't had an ebook reprint by now - it's really excellent and not particularly dated. Highly recommended.

An excellent middle-grade supernatural mystery about family, friendship, and ghosts.

Twelve-year-old Amy is unhappy about always having to babysit her developmentally disabled eleven-year-old sister Louann, which means she doesn't get any alone time with her own friends. (It also means Louann doesn't get to have her own friends, though this isn't something Amy realizes yet.)

After a last-straw incident, Amy ends up staying over with her aunt Clare so she and Louann can get a break from each other for a little while. Amy and Aunt Clare have barely met, as Aunt Clare only recently moved into the neighborhood to stay at the previously vacant old family house until she gets a new job and can move back to the city. To Amy's delight, there's a dollhouse in the attic which is a perfect replica of the old house - complete with dolls of her deceased grandparents, Aunt Clare as a teenager, and Amy's father as a little boy.

Aunt Clare hates the dollhouse to the point where she doesn't even want to talk about it. The other thing no one in the family wants to talk about? What exactly happened to their grandparents. This gets extra awkward when Amy realizes that the dolls seem to be moving around by themselves...

A fast-paced, fun, spooky book with good family dynamics. Louann and Amy's relationship is central to the book, as is the dysfunctional position their parents have put them in by infantilizing Louann and not letting either her or Amy have their own independent lives. The mystery of what's going on with the dollhouse and why goes some way toward explaining why their parents are like that, and a long way toward explaining why Aunt Clare is the way she is. More importantly, it catalyzes a positive change in Amy and Louann's relationship, as well as their individual relationships with other people, when the two of them first have to function separately for the first time in their lives, then have to figure out the haunted dollhouse together.

This is not a "disabled people are magical" book - Louann and Amy have different strengths that help them deal with the supernatural, without that trope coming into play at all. The book does contain depictions of ableism but they're not endorsed by the author.

Thanks, mildred_of_midgard!

Two WWII RAF fighter pilots are shot down over enemy lines, then fall into a strange world at the center of the Earth!

This 1952 boys' adventure book is charmingly enthusiastic. It opens with a note on how the author found the manuscript in a war-torn area and believes that it's absolutely true, then dives into first-person accounts of the two pilots, Johnny Wild and Danny Black, who are shot down! Over water! In enemy territory! And fall into a pit! Where they almost die of hunger and thirst! Before they realize that they can parachute down into an even deeper hole! And arrive in a strange land in the center of the earth that's at war! And help the inhabitants build an airplane!

This is a lot of fun but I couldn't help wishing that the amazing plot had been written by W. E. Johns; Carter's style is a little dry, and despite telling us that Johnny is the leader and the smart one and Danny is the follower and the strong one, they feel interchangeable. But the plot is great and it's full of fascinating little period details: emergency chocolate concentrate is dry and bitter, and parachutes were equipped with inflatable dinghies and paddles! (Or did he make that up?) The underground world is also full of cool little details, like that there are no animals so everyone is vegetarian, and they have advanced electrical/battery technology but no gunpowder.

I'm surprised I never heard of Bruce Carter (real name Richard Hough) before because he's one of those "does more stuff than any normal twelve people" guys that I tend to enjoy - he was a RAF fighter pilot in WWII, wrote 90 books, was a maritime historian, married children's book author/illustrator Charlotte Hough who served prison time for assisting in the suicide of an 85-year-old friend (Her daughter recalled that, afterwards, "She was always saying, 'When I was in prison' and bringing dinner parties to a shuddering halt."), and had five children of whom three became authors.

Content note: Period-typical, relatively mild, completely random racism, like We passed the time whilst walking discussing the merits of white, yellow, brown, and black skins.