Biting the Wax Tadpole: Confessions of a Language Fanatic, by Elizabeth Little

Things I love: words. Words and I are very good friends, if you know what I mean, which is that I really like learning about them. Where they came from, what they do, how funny they can be. See: my love of a children's book called Word Snoop. And this book is better, because it is for adults and therefore includes swear words. I am a big fan of a well-placed swear word, and Little clearly has practice in this.

I thought this book was going to be about something like the vagaries of translation, because of the title, which references a terrible transliteration of the words "Coca-Cola" into Mandarin. But actually, that's just a bit that's in the conclusion, and the rest of the book is EVEN BETTER, because it talks about verbs and modifiers and nouns and how nouns are pretty set in their ways in English, but how you have to go and decline them in other languages, and how some languages have a really fun time pluralizing nouns, and how the Bantu language family isn't content with just two or three noun classes (aka genders), no, no, how about 16? Or 22? I kind of want to die just thinking about it.

And Little feels that pain, and loves it! About noun class, she writes, "Grammatical gender often appears to be based on just the right combination of reason and utterly arbitrary dart-throwing monkey logic to ensure maximum confusion," which is SO TRUE, at least with what I remember of my French.

Little also throws in all these little sidebars of awesomeness, which highlight things that are really neat about various languages. So in a sidebar about noun tense, for instance, Little talks about how the Guaraní language adds endings to verbs to signify tense. There's a past-tense marker and a future-tense marker, which is cool, but EVEN COOLER is that you can combine them. Little's example uses presidents, so with this combination of endings you can get a word for Al Gore: mburuvicharangue, or "what we thought was going to be a future president but then turned out not to be." How cool is that?

I will grant that this might not be that cool to you — my husband certainly gave me funny looks about that last example and others that I shared with him. But if you've ever suffered through a conjugation in your life, you will probably find something to like in here.

Recommendation: An absolute must for lovers of words or languages or humorous anecdotes.

Rating: 10/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Name of the Wind, by Patrick Rothfuss

Another frame story! This is becoming a theme, it seems...

And darn this frame story all to heck. I picked up this book not knowing too much about it except that a) I keep seeing people mentioning it as a pretty awesome book and b) it was published in 2007 and therefore necessary for my Countdown Challenge. So when it started in all epic fantasy with its innkeeper with a shady past and creepy spider things that are not demons but are probably something more terrifying, I was like, "All right. This will be fun." AND THEN YOU NEVER FIND OUT ANYTHING MORE ABOUT THE SPIDERS.

Ahem.

One of my pet peeves in epic fantasy is this conceit of showing the reader a gun in Act I and then waiting until act, like, XVII to have it go off. This is only meant to be a three-book series, so I suppose there won't be that much waiting, but UGH.

Anyway, after the whole spiders thing happens, it turns out that one of the characters is some famous scribe who writes down the lives of other famous people, and also that the innkeeper with the shady past is a formerly Very Famous Person now languishing in Do You Remember That Guy land. After the scribe works some psychological magic on the innkeeper, the innkeeper is like, "Fine. I will tell you my story. It will take three days. Hope you don't have carpal tunnel."

This book is Day One of the story-telling, and here the story veers away from Epic Fantasy and settles into a more Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire land, with the long rambling stories that don't really have anything driving them (see: Quidditch World Cup). It is also similar in that most of Kvothe's story here takes place at an Academy, where Kvothe is like the smartest kid there, but waaay too cocky, and also very poor, and he's like Hermione and Harry and Ron all rolled into one, with even a vicious Draco to play against.

But... I liked the Harry Potter book. For all the long rambling quidditch and the ridiculous school antics, I at least knew that something was going to happen, and the things that happen generally lead toward that something. The Name of the Wind is just a set of stories about Kvothe's life, from being a gypsy kid to going to the Academy to trying to track down the thing what killed his parents. But there's never anything really driving the action, and for all I hoped that there would be spiders in the end, there were not. I'm sure that this is all building up toward something in the second and third books, but I'm the kind of reader who has to have at least some little morsel now, if you're going to keep me interested for another couple of 700-page books. And I don't feel like I got that.

Recommendation: Don't go into this expecting classic epic fantasy, but read this if you have the patience for that sort of story that's going to ramble on for a few books.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge, Chunkster Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
medieval bookworm
reading is my superpower

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The House of Tomorrow, by Peter Bognanni

"This is a point. It has no dimensions. It has no length, breadth, depth at all."
Jared listened without complaint.
"I don't know about you," I said, "But I feel very similar to a point lately."
"Fuckin' A," he said.

That's a quote from about three-quarters of the way through this book, and I'd say it's a pretty apt summary of the whole thing. The House of Tomorrow has a lot going on in it — you've got a kid living in a geodesic dome with a grandmother obsessed with R. Buckminster Fuller, a kid living with a secondhand heart trying to make a punk rock band as good as the Ramones or the Misfits while his mother hopes that giving her life to the church will help her deal with everything, and you've got what happens when these two kids meet, which is as odd and comical as you'd expect. But what the book is about, as far as I can tell, is how hard it is to define yourself when everyone around you is trying to make that definition for you. Which is what we humans deal with pretty much every second of every day, but Sebastian and Jared deal with it in a much more entertaining fashion.

An interesting thing about this book is that it reads like YA — teen protagonists, coming of age, overprotective parents, etc. etc. But I definitely got this book from the adult section, which I think is spectacular because there are so many books that get relegated to the YA section that need to be read by pretty much everyone, and this would be one of them. I would really like to know how Bognanni managed to get this marketed to adults.

I think what I really loved about this book was the writing of Sebastian, the kid from the geodesic dome. I have read so many books and seen so many movies where a similar character is presented as completely alien and mockable, but Sebastian was so real — sure, he has a weird way of talking, but the thoughts in his brain aren't any different from Jared's, and you can see that.

At times I felt that the plot was getting a little ridiculous — Jared decides that the band is going to play at the church youth group talent show, and somehow a full-scale viral marketing campaign gets hatched, including convincing a record store clerk that the band is the new cool indie thing that he should totally have heard of were he not living under a rock, which seemed a bit unrealistic to me. But then I remembered that I was totally okay with Sebastian living in a geodesic dome and I thought maybe I should cut the band a break. If you're prepared to suspend your disbelief just a little bit, I think you'll better appreciate the fun of the novel.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
The Book Lady's Blog
Devourer of Books

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Foiled, by Jane Yolen

I've started to really like these graphic novels... they're often cute and quick and brimming with delightfulness and pretty pictures.

This book definitely had the pretty pictures, but I'm not really sure where Yolen was going with the story.

The plot, as far as I can tell: Aliera is a high-school outcast and a top-notch fencer. Her mother has bought her a new weapon from a tag sale, and it's pretty awesome except for the giant ruby-looking thing on its handle. Also, there's a new and also very hott kid in school, who is Aliera's new lab partner, and Aliera is all tongue-tied around him. He's weird, but cute, and the crushing is on. And then he asks Aliera on a date and some WEIRD stuff happens. Like, super-weird. Like, I would have read an entire book about the weird stuff and been delighted, but it doesn't fit with the beginning of the book at all.

Sigh. It's really pretty! And I can sort of draw some meaning from the story, like that people aren't always what they seem. But I'm still confused about this book. Maybe someone can explain it to me?

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Stuff As Dreams Are Made On...

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Invisible Gorilla, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons

A few months ago, I listened to a pretty interesting book on CD called How We Decide. I liked it, it was an interesting topic, but by the end of the CD I was all, "I am going to pistol-whip the next guy that says 'pre-frontal cortex.'"

Basically, you could go to that review, swap out the titles, and replace "pre-frontal cortex" with "illusion" and you've got my review of this book.

Don't get me wrong, it was good for the first five or six hours (out of nine-ish?) that Scott and I listened to it on our drive from Cleveland to Jacksonville. The title story is really the best, and there are a lot of other good examples of people overestimating themselves or being overestimated by people — the book is basically about how we think we're awesome at remembering things or at talking on cell phones while driving, but we are so not.

But then it starts getting old, and THEN the authors go into a diatribe about how you should totally get your kids vaccinated, which I agree with but man, I was starting to think about not vaccinating my hypothetical children out of spite. It was seriously annoying.

Once we weren't stuck in the car anymore, it was hard to get up the will to finish this book, but we did, and it does end on a good note. But like How We Decide, I would highly recommend getting it in book form so that you can skim the super annoying and super boring parts.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Physics of the Buffyverse, by Jennifer Ouellette

This is the first book I checked out from my new library system in Florida, so I'm glad it was fairly decent. :) It was on a shelf full of non-fiction science books, which are okay in general, but one look at that title and I was sold. I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even though I've seen probably only half of the episodes (this is getting slowly rectified through the wonders of Netflix), and I've been in an on-again, off-again relationship with physics for a long time, so why wouldn't I pick up this book?

Now, I'd say you really need to have some sort of relationship with physics to read this book. It's not so much "The Physics of the Buffyverse" as it is "Regular Physics Explained Through the Use of Events in Buffy and Angel," which is still cool but by the time you get to string theory, your head might explode, and not because of a scream that resonates as the same frequency as your head (Ouellette's explanation for the death of the Gentlemen).

Other than that, the writing is solid and Ouellette does a pretty good job keeping the confusing bits interesting. I was just really hoping for some creative made-up physics rather than the "Well, this could never happen, but here's something similar that could" avoidances, so I ended up disappointed. In the book, anyway. All of the little spoilers Ouellette gives out have made me even more excited to watch Buffy, and even Angel, which I have never actually seen. Let me just run off to my television now...

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Tell-All, by Chuck Palahniuk

What a... very odd book. I'm not really sure what to say about it. I definitely would not have picked it up except that my book club is reading it this month, and I almost didn't want to read it anyway.

Maybe it's because I don't follow a lot of celebrity things and have never read a tell-all book, but I really really really hated all the name-dropping, made even more irritating by the fact that every proper noun was in bold face. It's mostly spread out, but every once in a while there's a sentence like, "By now, Lillian Hellman wraps two fists around the invisible throat of Adolf Hitler, reenacting how she sneaked into his subterranean Berlin bunker, dressed as Leni Riefenstahl, her arms laden with black-market cartons of Lucky Strike and Parliament cigarettes, and then throttled the sleeping dictator in his bed." And then I cry.

The really exciting bit (one might call it the plot) doesn't come until halfway through the book, but once it starts it's quite interesting. I was sure the book was going to end one way, and it sort of did but there was more to it that I had not at all anticipated. I like that. But I wouldn't read this again, or make you read it, either.

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Faithful Place, by Tana French

And finally, we get to the new book! I have been very excited for this book ever since I heard it was coming out, which was maybe not that long ago, but still! And I got it from the library the first day I could, but I was all busy with reading other books and it took me like A WEEK before I could read it. The travesty!

Maybe it was all that excitement from the first paragraph, or maybe it's because I got myself all worked up by reading the previous two books first, but I felt rather let down by this installment. :( No, I know what it was... French's books have always been more character-driven than mystery-driven, but this book pretty much threw away the mystery story in favor of an in-depth look into Frank Mackey, who I didn't care much about in the first place. Sigh.

The mystery, what it is, is first that a suitcase shows up in Mackey's family's neighborhood, and it belongs to the girl he meant to run away to England with many years ago. She never showed, but Mackey went off anyway and never went home... until this suitcase thing. It quickly turns out that his girl, Rosie, is dead under some concrete in a dilapidated building, and then before you can wrap your head around that Mackey's brother ends up dead, having fallen out of a window in some manner or other. Mackey, being Mackey, goes off to do his investigating while being bombarded on all sides by family and history.

It's interesting, sure, but I'd gotten used to hearing about French's characters in bits and pieces and anecdotes, not all at once, and because there's so much focus on Mackey's history the mystery part of the book falls flat. I wouldn't tell you not to read this book, but I would personally rather go read In the Woods again first.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

In the Woods, by Tana French

I read this book once before, waaaaay back in the day (well, relatively speaking). I absolutely loved it, and I told everyone who had ears that it was a wonderful book and that they should go read it and why were they still talking to me etc. So when I got to pick the book for and lead a discussion group for my library practicum, I was like, "Have they read In the Woods? Because they should have. I will now make them."

And then I packed up my books to send down to Jacksonville with Scott, and I packed this book omg! So I had to borrow it from the library. The library must really love me.

So I got like six people to read this book all at once, which was delightful, and of course I had to read it again, because although I remembered how it ended I knew there was a lot more in the middle that I was missing in my memory. Oh boy, was there. I had forgotten how much confusion there is — they're looking for a killer, obviously, but then there's this other case that might tie in, and there are so many leads to follow up on and people to talk to and it's a wonder this case even gets solved at all!

And knowing the ending already... man. I could see where all of these threads were leading, slowly but surely, and I was still like, "No! Don't let it happen! CAN'T YOU SEE WHAT'S GOING ON HERE?!?!?!" Oh. It's kind of devastating. You can see how ridiculously clever, and plotting, and foresight-having, and completely insane the killer is, and I have a certain respect for that even though of course we should use such powers for good. Of course.

What I'm saying is, if you haven't read it already, seriously, go do that please, and if you have read it and you have some free time on your hands, read it again. Wonderful.

Rating: 10/10 (it was a 9 before, but the ending is much less disappointing the second time around!)
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Flashback Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge, Chunkster Challenge)

See also:
Reading Matters
reading is my superpower
books i done read

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Thirteen Reasons Why, by Jay Asher

Hmm. I wanted to like this book, I did. It came with good recommendations, and it's even on one or more of those award lists I'm reading from for my YA lit class. But except for maybe twenty or thirty minutes, I spent the six and a half hours of audiobook rolling my eyes and bitching at Hannah. I'm not thinking I was supposed to do that. I am really getting old before my time.

The story revolves around Clay Jensen, who gets a package of thirteen cassette tapes in the mail. He is intrigued by this strange anachronism and begins listening to them, only to find out that they are essentially the last words of Hannah Baker, a girl who committed suicide a couple weeks back. On each tape Hannah details an event or person who made her life so horrible that she was driven to kill herself, and instructs the listeners to pass on the tapes, lest a second set be released to the general high-school public for everyone to listen to.

So on the one hand, it's an interesting read/listen, because most of the events are teeny-tiny things that no one would think anything of on their own, but you can understand how the combination of all of them might make someone want to just disappear off the face of the earth. However, I had a hard time thinking of these things as being enough to make someone want to stop living completely. There were a couple of events that made me think, "Wow. Those suck. I would probably go into a very deep depression if those happened to me," but those were completely unrelated to the other events and as such I think Hannah's cassette package could have been much smaller.

I imagine that back in high school, when I was even less popular than Hannah Baker (but didn't have any crazy rumors floating around... that I know of...), I might have connected more with this book. As it stands, I was a little too busy thinking about how stupid Hannah was to think about other things, like how her situation might apply to my life or how I might go about being nicer to other people.

Rating: 4/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
The Written World
Maw Books Blog
Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'?
My Friend Amy

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Plain Janes, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Well, this was a seriously perfect beach read — nice and quick, so I didn't get a sunburn! I must remember these things in the future. :)

The plot: After a bomb goes off in Metro City and lands Jane in the hospital for a little while, her parents move the family off to suburbia to start a new, safer life. Of course, this sucks for Jane, especially since she gets to start school six weeks late. At her first lunch, she's invited to sit with the popular kids, but gravitates instead to a group of girls who share her name — Jayne, Polly Jane, and another Jane. They don't accept her at first, but Jane is determined, so she comes up with a way to bring the foursome together: stealth art attacks. The "attacks" are really just art displays like rock pyramids or a balloon solar system, but the school and the police take them pretty seriously, leading to some delightful civil disobedience.

It's not a terribly deep book, but I loved seeing the art pieces the Janes put together — this is a graphic novel, so you really get to see what's going on! I was never really arty, but I would totally have helped build some of the Janes' structures if someone else had designed them. I also remembered not so fondly that need to be accepted in high school and the way that parents want to take care of you but you just want to do your own thing.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2007, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Tender Morsels, by Margo Lanagan

What a weird little book. I'm not sure if that's good or bad... it just is. This was another pick for my YA class this summer, and one that I'd been meaning to read since I heard about it on NPR a while back. Not sure I'd have finished it except for my class, though.

The beginning is... awkward, is how I'd put it. As soon as I started reading, I was like, "Wait, this is a young adult book? Ooookay." It starts with a, um, romp in the hay, as it were, between a young man and woman, and then gets into icky incest between a different young woman and her father, and abortions, and then has a, well, a gang rape. It is less than delightful. It is pretty awful, actually. Which is, I guess, appropriate. But anyway. Soon after these horrible things, the second young woman, Liga, comes across some fancy magic and gets transported into a lovely world where all of the bad people she used to know are gone and where she can raise her two daughters (yes, from the aforementioned bad things) in peace. But of course, it being magic and all, it's not perfect, and soon outsiders who have no business being in Liga's world are barging in all willy-nilly and upsetting the balance of Liga's life.

I liked the middle part of this book very much, with the outsiders and the daughters dealing with them and their lives and Liga sort of seeing what kind of world she lived in. But the beginning part was squicky, and the ending part dragged on a little long and sort of danced around whatever points Lanagan was trying to make. However, I appreciated the point that I did catch on to, that perfect heaven worlds aren't really all they're cracked up to be, and I was interested in the descriptions of the real world Liga left behind. This is definitely a good book for thinking about, and would probably make a great book club read if you had the right people for it.

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2008, Orbis Terrarum Challenge: Australia, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
books i done read
A Striped Armchair
things mean a lot

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang

This is one of those books that I've been hearing about for a long time, but that I never had any interest in reading, primarily because it was a graphic novel. It's not that I don't like graphic novels, it's just that I have a hard time reading and looking at the pictures all together and I'm not generally convinced that I couldn't have imagined a book better than it was drawn. That latter part is the reason I have trouble with movie versions of books, too.

But this book? I couldn't have imagined it better, and I really do think that the illustrations are what make this book so awesome. So if you're like me, just forget your graphic novel problems and go read this.

There are three stories all intertwined in this book; we jump from the myth of the Monkey King to the new Chinese kid in school to the all-American kid trying to escape his crazy, stereotypical, flamboyantly Chinese cousin. In all of these stories, the protagonist wants to be something he's not — the Monkey King wants to be human, the new kid wants to be an American, the American kid wants to be not related ever again to his crazy cousin. Eventualy, all of these characters meet, and they all realize in the end that what's most important is to be yourself.

And that sounds kind of hokey and after-school-special-y, but it reads a heck of a lot better and it looks a heck of a lot prettier than I wrote it. Yang perfectly captures the spirit of those middle-school years, when all you wanted was to fit in. I wish that this book had been around when I was in middle school! Could have saved myself a lot of time and effort. :)

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
dreadlock girl
The Book Zombie

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Pox Party, by M.T. Anderson

I've had this one on my shelf awhile, and it almost went back to the library unread except that it's one of the books on my summer YA class reading list. I'm a big fan of getting things done early if they're things I want to do... just don't ask me about my final project due tomorrow!

Anyway... I have to say that if this hadn't been on my reading list, I probably wouldn't have finished it. It's very different from the books I usually read — it's historical fiction, it's partly epistolary, it's written in the tone of the 18th century, it's more of a narrative than a plot-driven story. It has a really long series title: The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation. But I did finish it, and I didn't hate it, but I didn't really like it.

Here's the plot: There's a kid called Octavian who lives with a bunch of nutty scholar-types who are performing experiments on him because he's a Negro and they want to know if he and his "homo afri" brain are as good as them with their "homo europaei" brains. These aren't painful experiments; they consist of lessons in music and classical languages mostly and are just meant to see if Octavian is actually able to learn them. Not a big deal... well, until the scholars' main benefactor kicks the bucket and the new guy in charge decides to prove that Octavian can't. Then Octavian runs away and we are told his story through the letters of others as he tries to have freedom in Revolutionary War-era Boston. How fun.

I liked Octavian, and rooted for him as he slowly discovered the truth behind his living arrangments and the world around him. I liked his sympathetic friends, and I even felt for some of the not sympathetic characters because Anderson did a good job showing the flip side of the whole slavery thing. I didn't really like the long stretches of nothing happening, but I know that Anderson was making a point and I appreciate it. I guess that's how it is with more literary novels, for me — I might not really like them, but I appreciate how they're built and executed and I'm glad I've read them. Unfortunately, I think my favorite part of this book was its presentation — deckled edges and an 18th century-style title page. Lovely.

Basically, don't go into this novel expecting excitement. The full title may include the words "astonishing life", but that might be just the tiniest bit hyperbolic. :) Maybe in the second book it gets more exciting?

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Blogging for a Good Book

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Sharp Objects, by Gillian Flynn

What a weird effing book. Seriously. I felt dirty and gross after reading it. I should have stopped at page 19 like I wanted to, but I wanted to know what happened!

This is my problem with reading mysteries/thrillers/suspense novels/what-have-you. It doesn't matter how crappy the writing or the story or the characters are... if the mystery intrigues me I get so drawn in! In this particular case, the story goes like this: A little girl goes missing in Small Town, MO, less than a year after another little girl went missing and was found dead, teeth pulled out of her mouth (yes, this book gets gory, don't read if you're squeamish!). A journalist, originally from Small Town and now working at a third-rate paper in Chicago, is sent down to get the story, with the idea that even a former local will get better info than a stranger. Of course, people who leave Small Towns don't usually want to go back, and neither does our journalist, Camille, because she's got some serious emotional baggage from a crappy mother and a dead sister and the price of high-school popularity. But she goes, and when the second girl is found dead, teeth pulled out of her mouth, the mystery gets interesting... and when things start coming to light about just how much emotion fits in that baggage Camille is carrying, it gets downright intriguing.

My problem with this book wasn't really the writing, per se, as what Flynn was writing about — the murders are gory, I can deal with that, but then she goes and throws in all this weird sex and drinking and drug use that happens in such implausible (well, to me anyway... I'm not really well-versed in casual sex, alcoholism, or recreational drug use) situations and I really had to just put the blinders on, skim through the weird parts, and focus on the investigation at hand. But even skimming those parts made me feel gross. Ucch.

And then after everything the ending feels really rushed, like Flynn knew I wasn't going to put up with her shenanigans much longer and wanted to make sure that I found out whodunnit, but considering that whodunnit is what I cared about, not Camille's sex life, I wish that Flynn had spent a few more pages making it even slightly suspenseful.

Basically, if you like really weird and awkward situations, and if you don't mind talk of self-mutilation (oh, yeah, there's lots of that) and thirteen-year-olds doing drugs, and if you don't really care about the mystery part... you'll probably like this book better than I did. It was just not the right book for me.

Question: I have Dark Places, Flynn's second novel, waiting on my shelf right now. Given my opinion of Sharp Objects, should I read the other one?

Rating: 5/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2006, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Summer Before, by Ann M. Martin

Hey, remember a while back when I was all excited about the return of the BSC? Yep, still excited. So excited, in fact, that I read this prequel to the series, which introduces our intrepid babysitting foursome as they prepare to start the seventh grade.

The story covers Kristy's birthday and her wish that her deadbeat dad will show up, Mary Anne's first adventure in babysitting, Claudia's first sort-of-boyfriend and the beginning of her estrangement from Mary Anne and Kristy, and Stacey's crappy New York friends and move to Connecticut.

It's about that fast-paced, too... I admit that I haven't read a BSC book in more than 10 years so they probably all are. But if I recall correctly, there was usually at least an overarching storyline to the books — this one is more vignette-y and thus a little harder to follow.

All in all, this is not the BSC book to start with. This is a book for BSC fans who want just one more story with their favorite kids. :)

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Lord Sunday, by Garth Nix

Finally, I've read the last of the Keys to the Kingdom series, which I started reading during my first Summer Reading Project back in 2006. I would link to the page, but it is a horror of Dreamweaver that is best left locked up, lest it bite someone.

I have to admit that I went to Wikipedia before starting the book, because I had forgotten pretty much everything that ever happened, and I was still confused when I read it. So I'm going to recommend just reading these all straight through if you ever do — they're super short and it'll only take you a couple days.

It was still a good story. Lord Sunday picks up where Superior Saturday left off, with Arthur having just grabbed the Sixth Key and begun falling through a big ol' hole in the floor. It continues on in the same vein as the other books, by which I mean he goes to find the Seventh Key and the corresponding part of the Will, and gets in trouble along the way, and then totally finds them. But this one's harder to get because Lord Sunday really really really doesn't want to give the key up for some reason... and that part of the book was so close to being spectacular! So close. Suffice it to say that there is an unexpected (to me, anyway) reason for the Will's existance, and that Nix could have gone with a really cool ending but went with a sappy one instead. But I suppose, this being a book for kids and all, that it's the only ending the publishers would have allowed. At least, that's how I'm going to defend it. :)

All right, guys, what weird little kids book series should I get addicted to next?

Rating: 7/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

Meanwhile, by Jason Shiga

Oh, what a delightful book! I loved Choose Your Own Adventure stories as a kid, and I quite enjoyed Shiga's Bookhunter when I read it last summer, so when I found out that Shiga had written and illustrated a graphic Choose Your Own Adventure-style book? Yeah, that went right on my library holds list.

But then I did something silly and jumped right into the story, failing right away by wanting vanilla ice cream and then finally getting on sort of the right track only to be completely stumped by the fact that I had gotten stuck at a place where I apparently needed to enter a code, and where the heck was I supposed to find this code? I went through a few story routes trying to find it, and then just tried to brute force my way through the many many wrong answers to find the right one, and then I just gave up. But I showed the book to Scott and told him he should look at the pretty pictures and maybe try to figure it out. And he did. Easily. Because he read the instructions at the beginning. Do we see who is the man in this relationship? -sigh-

So I went back through, and once I knew what I was meant to be doing the story played out quickly and easily and also very very creepily, when you think about it, which you will after you go find this book and read it. And Shiga knows all about your COYA cheating ways, so there's a page that has nothing to do with anything thrown into the middle of the book, and even a page that has something to do with something that you can only get to if a) you're like Scott and you get two pages stuck together while flipping through or b) you're a cheater face and you're looking for something and you find this something instead of the correct something.

Oh, and there's quantum physics, which is always a good time, right? Right? No? Just me? Ah, well.

Rating: 8/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.r

This World We Live In, by Susan Beth Pfeffer

Oh, I wanted to love this book so much. I absolutely adored the other two books in this series, which were full of suspense and emotion and just win in general, and I was intrigued by the prospect of the two protagonists meeting each other. But.

Well, let's just start with the obvious — this book is completely different from the other two. It takes place after the events of both, and the world is starting to look up. So right away the suspense of "what's going to happen next oh no terrible things are going to happen I can't look let me peek through my fingers" is dialed way down to something more like "what's going to happen next it's probably going to be okay there aren't as many terrible things that could happen but I'll keep reading in case one does." Which, okay. It's a different book. If I wanted more of the same I should just go re-read the others.

But I was hoping the book would at least speak to me in the same way. New book, new situations, but still a poignant outlook on a bleak life? Not really. The characters pretty much refuse to be developed, so even when terrible things did happen I was just like, "Oh, that happened," unlike my barely-stifled sobs in reading the other books.

I will give Pfeffer credit for not just making the world all bright and shiny again, and for giving us a sense of what else is happening in the world outside of Miranda's house. But now I'm going to pretend this never happened and go back to the ambiguous endings I liked so much from the previous books. And then I'll see what other stories Pfeffer has to offer, because they're probably pretty darn good.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
My Friend Amy
biblio+chic

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.

The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag, by Alan Bradley

I read and enjoyed The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie way back in October, and I was delighted that there would be a sequel! I actually got my hands on a copy the day it was released, but various school- and work-related happenings meant I couldn't read it until it was well overdue to the library. Ah, well. So it goes.

The plot is thus: a travelling puppet show breaks down in Flavia's village and she makes friends with one of the pair, to whom the other of the pair is acting atrocious. The village's vicar invites the puppeteer to put on a show in town to make some money for the repairs of his vehicle, and Flavia ends up helping to prepare the show while spending her spare time being incredibly snoopy into the pair's affairs. Eventually a Terrible Thing happens and Flavia sets to solving the mystery.

It's hard to summarize this second mystery novel, as it is kind of short on the mystery... I mean, there's talk of what ends up being the mystery early on, but no one new dies until nearly halfway through the book, at which point I thought that the story would pick up but it didn't, really. And when the mystery was all wrapped up I wasn't sure that I, as the reader, had been shown enough clues to have figured out the mystery myself, which always makes me cranky. But for the most part, this book is less mystery and more "let's put a bit more backstory into Bishop's Lacey," which is all well and good but I wish I had been warned.

However, the writing is still fun and Flavia is still delightfully focused on her chemistry, so it's not all bad. I was thoroughly engrossed in reading the book once I had a chance to sit down and do so, and I am intrigued to see where Bradley goes in the next book, which he is apparently already writing. As long as he doesn't rely too much on precociousness and science to woo me (which, well, it does), I think the series could do very well.

Rating: 6/10
(Countdown Challenge: 2010, Orbist Terrarum Cahllenge: Canada, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
book-a-rama
BookEnds

Pass me yours, if you've got 'em.