The Land of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

After finishing The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which was super-interesting in a "So that's how the story is meant to go!" way, I figured it couldn't hurt to try out a completely unknown-to-me Oz story. It didn't hurt, certainly, but it was... weird.

Which, I mean, it's weird in the same ways that the first book is weird, because that's how Baum rolls, except that this time I wasn't prepared for the specific weird-ities and so was like, what?

So there's a kid called Tip, and he tries to pull a prank on his guardian, Mombi, except that the prank totally backfires and now Tip is running away to the Emerald City with a formerly-inanimate pumpkin-head scarecrow-thing called Jack. Along they way, Tip meets a girl called Jinjur who is set to overthrow the Scarecrow as bigwig of the Emerald City because, of course, all of those shiny emeralds and whatnot would be much better served as necklaces and other shiny things for Jinjur's girl army. Of course. So, Tip finds the Scarecrow and they all go running off but even though the Scarecrow is all about abdicating, Jinjur still apparently wants them dead, so she recruits Mombi to pull some hocus-pocus and trap the group. And then some appropriately Baum-weird stuff happens and it turns out that there's someone else who's meant to be leading Oz...

It's all very strange, but also very delightful, and Anna Fields is absolutely perfect in narrating this series. There's not much else to say, really! I am sad that I don't have quick access to the next few books, but considering all I've got on my plate for the near future, I think that's all right!

Recommendation: For those days when you just need something that makes you smile at its ridiculousness.

Rating: 8/10

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum

Dorothy. Toto. Witches. Wizard. Hot-air balloon. The end! Review over!

Okay, no. I'll tell you more, as I actually found this book quite intriguing. My experience with Oz is primarily Wicked, the musical, which is fantastic; Wicked, the book (and its first sequel), which is frickin' weird; and The Wizard of Oz, the movie, which I have seen all the way through maybe twice and probably not more recently than a decade ago. So as I was reading the book, I was constantly asking the husband, who has seen the movie many times, whether these things in the book were the same at all. Mostly, they were, but even the things that were the same were a little bit different!

The general story is the same, with all those words up at the top. Kansas is still super-duper grey, but no one bicycles outside the window during the tornado. Dorothy still squashes dead the Wicked Witch of the East, but no one really cares about her. The Good Witch of the North is not Glinda, and is also awesomely self-important (see her line that is something like, "The witches of the North and South are the good ones, which I know because I am one"). There's a wonderful road of yellow brick, Dorothy meets some needy fellows, Oz is like, "I'm totally all-powerful but could you maybe go kill the Wicked Witch of the West for me?" Said W³ has not only flying monkeys, but also wolves, crows, and bees, but even with all that at her command she gives Dorothy a bucket of water which ends up melting the witch. The Wizard is like, crap, and placebos the needy fellows but offers Dorothy a ride in his hot-air balloon, which Toto totally screws up. Dorothy journeys to actual-Glinda of the South for help, with the needy fellows getting offered kingships along the way, and Glinda's like, "Well, you could just use those shoes you took off of W²E and wish yourself home," and Dorothy's like, "Sweet," and does just that.

So, interesting! I think that the book version manages to make more internal sense than the movie, except for that whole bucket of water thing, but of course there is no singing in the book and that is just disappointing! So, I should probably go watch the movie again, preferably with my cute little cousin-in-law dressed up as the Tin Man, as she is wont to do.

Recommendation: For lovers of delight and those who want to complete their movie experience.

Rating: 8/10

Juniper Berry, by M.P. Kozlowsky

One of the nice things about putting the stickers on library books is that I get to see these books before they make it out to the shelves, and often before regular library-goers even know these books exist. Sometimes I have no idea why the library buys some of these books. At better times, I go "oooooooh shiny want" and pull out my smartphone and put the book on hold so I can get it first!

This is, obviously, one of those books, and what struck me about it first was the cover, which is delightfully stylized. Then I saw the bit about "a tale of terror and temptation," and then I looked at the back which reads only "Be careful what you wish for." I didn't even have to read all the way through the book flap to know I wanted this book to come home with me. Phone! Hold!

Now, the book is not quite as exciting as all that, unfortunately, but I still found it rather adorable and worth a read by the braver children in your life. Juniper Berry is our protagonist of the amusing name, and she's the daughter of some very busy acTOR parents who have been acting increasingly weird of late. She is isolated in her giant house surrounded by forest, but one day she meets a boy called Giles in her backyard who is worried about his own strange-acting parents. He followed them to Juniper's yard, where they disappeared. Juniper and Giles set off to find out what their parents are doing, and it turns out to be a lot more creepy and sinister than they might have imagined.

It's sort of like a Coraline, I'd say. Very sort of, actually, but the mood is similar and I think it is looking for the same audience. In this case, it's the parents who have gone off looking for that elusive greener grass, but Juniper is still the one who has to set everything right because, you know, parents are useless. This book is also a little more obvious with its message of "no seriously just chill and make the best of the life you have because the life you want can kind of suck," but it's still a totally valid message.

Recommendation: For those who like kick-butt kids and creepy demon types.

Rating: 7/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Grim Grotto, by Lemony Snicket

This is the second and last of the Unfortunate Events books Scott and I made it through on our road trip... Scott spent too much time sleeping for us to listen more. That's right. I'm blaming him. I'm sure he cares.

Right, so, this is the one, as I recalled before we started it, that features horseradish. And a submarine. I have an excellent memory, you can see. But it is true that there is a submarine, and it is captained by a man who says "AYE!" a lot and crewed by AYE!-man's step-daughter and the optimistic dude from The Miserable Mill. And there is a fungus among us and it is super-deadly except that the deadliness can be cured by horseradish. And so of course it is. Spoiler.

I liked this better than the previous book largely because it seems to have more going on — there's the fungus and the sugar bowl and some capturing and releasing and only a few more questions and a decent number of answers, aye. But overall the series is getting more tedious than I remember and I am really hoping that it picks up in the last two books, or I am going to be apologizing to Scott for the next five years.

Recommendation: I think you know if you're going to read this one or not.

Rating: 7/10

The Slippery Slope, by Lemony Snicket

Another road trip, another journey along the sad, sad path of the Baudelaire orphans! I'm not sure why that gets an exclamation mark, but it does.

Unfortunately (HA), I had forgotten how frightfully boring this installment is. After the violence and sloppy eating of The Carnivorous Carnival, this trip up a snow-covered mountain is just... meh.

What happens is this: Violet and Klaus have been separated from Sunny and are trying to find and rescue her, but they get sidetracked when they meet a wayward triplet and end up going to find the VFD headquarters, which has been set on fire. Meanwhile, Count Olaf is pretending it's The Bad Beginning all over again and making Sunny do chores. Yawn. Various secrets about the VFD are revealed, but of course they lead only to more secrets and more questions, and then in the end there is a very strange showdown that lets the orphans go on their not-so-merry way one more time.

I enjoyed it, certainly, because as always — TIM frickin' CURRY. But there is simply not enough exciting and treacherous in this story.

Recommendation: I mean, if you've read the other nine books already... :)

Rating: 7/10

Peter Pan, by J.M. Barrie

Continuing on the theme of books I should have already read, here is Peter Pan, which I have seen in Mary Martin movie form as well as on stage, once, though I barely remember, and of course I have seen Johnny Depp as Barrie in Finding Neverland.

The book, like The Princess Bride, plays out pretty much exactly like the movie I remember (though I'll grant that I haven't seen the movie in ten years or more), with Peter Pan losing his shadow at the Darlings' house, returning to fetch it, and then teaching Wendy, John, and Peter to fly off to Neverland. There they have some adventures with Peter and the infamous Captain Hook, and then eventually they return home to grow up, unlike Peter.

And it's so much more depressing than I remember! Part of this is the narrative around the action in the book, which describes for us poor readers how awful the Darling parents feel about the loss of their children, who are gone for quite a while, with Mr. Darling even taking to sleeping in Nana's kennel. It also describes often exactly how children feel about their parents, which wounds me as a potential parent. Clearly I should not have children.

The other depressing part is the same thing that drives Toy Story 3, which I cried over recently — growing up. The Darlings return home to grow up, and they do, and they become fairly boring and forget how to fly and think that perhaps Peter wasn't real after all. And Peter mostly forgets them, too, returning only sporadically to make good on Wendy's promise of a yearly visit. I'm getting sad just thinking about it!

But it is otherwise delightful, with Indians and pirates and an alligator with a clock in his tummy, and so I am glad to have gotten around to the book. But I think I'll stick with Mary Martin for the foreseeable future!

Recommendation: Definitely a good read, but not quite a good bedtime story.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Search for WondLa, by Tony DiTerlizzi

My main reaction to this book is this: WHAT.

I picked it up knowing absolutely nothing about it except that it had a neat cover and a strange title. The "jacket" copy (I grabbed the audio version) was interesting enough, with its promises of a kid living underground and busting out and discovering new and interesting things, that I figured I could give it a listen at work. So onto my iPod it went.

Listening to it, though... eh. I missed the part on the box where it said that Teri Hatcher was narrating, and that was a pleasant surprise at first, since I do love Hatcher's voice. But I quickly discovered that I do not like Teri Hatcher's robot voice, or her "Dory speaking whale" voice (from Finding Nemo, of course, and which Hatcher uses for a different, alien large animal) or, in fact, her teenage girl voice, which is possibly more that I hate teenage voices and inflections in general, see that link above. Uggggggggh.

So the story, then. There is a teenage girl — well, a twelve-year-old, so almost teenage — called Eva Nine (another narrating beef: Hatcher can't decide if it's pronounced eh-va, ee-va, or ay-va), who lives underground with her robot MUTHR, who is, obviously, her robot mother. It's just the two of them, and they're training Eva to go wander around Earth, or something, I'm not quite clear on this, but the training gets interrupted when a Bad Guy comes and burns up their hidey-hole. Eva runs off, then gets captured by the Bad Guy, then escapes with a couple of friend-types who are decidedly not human, then goes back to rescue MUTHR, then decides to figure out why she is not on Earth with the humans, and then there is more travelling and adventuring and oh, the title comes from some picture that Eva finds that has just the letters WondLa visible around the picture. Uh. Huh.

I guess this is a children's book, though I found it in the YA section (I imagine it's for older kids, younger teens), and so I guess I can forgive a lot of the telegraphed information and things that seem obvious to me but come as a "surprise" at the end. And one of the things that I absolutely did not see coming actually makes the book make a whole lot more sense, and makes it possibly better, and I wish I had figured it out sooner so I could have appreciated it while it was happening. But I had a lot of nitpicky problems with the story; I wondered how DiTerlizzi's version of a Babel Fish actually works or why the Bad Guy shows up in the first place or why certain things that seemed incredibly important got completely ignored for the rest of the book.

Oh, and then at the end something completely out of left field happens so that I will read the sequel. Not gonna happen.

I don't think I would read this book again, but if I were going to go back in time and pick this book up for the first time again, I would make sure it was in book form, as apparently there are neat illustrations and, of course, I wouldn't have to listen to the voices I disliked. And there's an interesting thing that I didn't check out because I didn't want to download something, but if you are reading this with kids they'll probably download it before you even realize — on the CDs and, I imagine, in the book are some illustrations that you can hold up to a webcam and that the aforementioned downloadable program will apparently decode and turn into some sort of interactive image or video or something? If you end up doing this, let me know what it is!

Recommendation: I think kids will like this; I think I would have liked it better as a kid, at least. I imagine that if you like DiTerlizzi's other stuff, this is probably right up that alley.

Rating: 6/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner's Dilemma, by Trenton Lee Stewart

It is just a week for finishing up series, it seems. After the last installment of this one, I was a little hesitant to continue, but I needed something to listen to at work and this is what I had. So it goes.

Luckily, I liked this one a heck of a lot more... for the most part. My plot problems with Perilous Journey are gone, replaced by an actually fairly interesting plot wherein the kids and the Whisperer are being protected from the bad guy up until one of them manages to run off and Bad Guy breaks in and steals the Whisperer, and the other three kids are left to fix this situation. And, awesomely, the evil genius bad guy actually uses some of that genius to totally screw the kids over. Awesome.

Of course, that means fewer puzzles, because that's how this series goes, but that's okay. I can deal with that. What I couldn't deal with was the annoying psychic bits, and then how the book ended — with a very strange move from the evil genius that just completely jarred me and then a way-too-nicely resolved mystery and future. You know how I hate it when people are happy.

Soooooooooo all in all it was another decent entry in the series, and probably quite entertaining if you're closer to the intended age level.

Recommendation: Again, for puzzle-lovers, and for people who've read the other books and want to know what happens.

Rating: 7/10

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey, by Trenton Lee Stewart

Here's another series that I'm enjoying on audiobook... I listened to the first book about a month ago and have just now gotten to this first sequel. It's definitely great for work because the plot is quite simple so there's not too much stopping and going back any time my work area gets too loud or I have to go chat someone up.

The idea of this book is the same as its predecessor... children who are very smart and talented in different ways work together to solve seemingly insurmountable problems. But whereas in the first book this idea was set against a plot of trying to take down an evil genius from inside his base of operations, here the plot is a bit... weaker. The same evil genius is back, and he's kidnapped the titular Benedict, but for the most part his existence and actions are just there to give the story a time limit of sorts. The real plot follows a path of puzzles that Benedict had laid out for the children to follow for funsies, before he got all kidnapped and whatnot.

This plot is both better and worse than the one before it. Better, because I liked the puzzling parts and enjoyed having more of them to try to solve myself (where possible). Worse, because outside of the puzzles there is very little to this book. The characters do their thing, I guess, but it's not terribly interesting.

But! The puzzles are generally interesting, and some of the scenarios the characters find themselves in are in fact intriguing, and if you're listening to this book while doing something else you can skip all the boring parts. Sweet!

Recommendation: Good if you like puzzles!

Rating: 7/10

The Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart

This is the kind of book that I would have read six times a week when I was younger. I have always been big into puzzles and riddles and whatnot, and the main character in this book (and series, apparently) has a keen eye for solving them, too. In fact, he's perhaps a little better at it than I am — or perhaps he's just a better guesser. Which is a good skill to have.

And especially in this story, as the main character, Reynie Muldoon, finds himself drafted into the titular society, whose aim is to bring together gifted and brave young souls to save the world. Silly world, always getting in trouble! This time, the world is facing some vague Emergency (isn't it always?) and the Mr. Benedict after whom the society is named has figured out that there are unsettling messages being transmitted into adult brains by children (because adults won't notice children talking to them, ha!). The exact point of the messages is unknown, but Benedict decides to send in his best and brightest on an undercover mission to the institute from which the messages are coming.

It's pretty exciting, is what I'm saying. Lots of danger and intrigue and lateral thinking. Reynie is the puzzle-solver of the group, while a kid called Sticky (because facts stick to him) has practically an eidetic memory, the Great Kate Weather Machine is a brute force to be reckoned with, and Constance Contraire is just stubborn, which isn't quite as useful.

At first, I wasn't quite getting into the story because it's all rather fantastic — I expected any minute to find out that everything was just some giant ploy to gain something or other. But no, this is a children's book and therefore quite attached to its ridiculousness. So just go with it. Once I did, I found myself enjoying it a heck of a lot more, because even the predictable bits of the story are infused with a self-aware humor that cuts a lot of the annoyance I had with The Sea of Trolls.

I will definitely be picking up the next book in this series, and then the one after that.

Recommendation: For kid geniuses, wannabe kid geniuses, and kid geniuses at heart.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Willoughbys, by Lois Lowry

Lois Lowry is one of those authors that does whatever she wants, isn't she? The Giver and its first companion book, Gathering Blue, are the only other books of hers that I've read, but I did quite like them (the former moreso than the latter), and so when I was looking for audiobooks and found this one, I thought I'd give it a shot.

Goooooooood call. It's definitely not The Giver, but it is equally spectacular. Firstly, the audiobook narrator is just splendid, and he amused me throughout the book with just the particular way he would say things. Secondly, the writing is just full of that deadpan humor that I like so much, where the characters are saying wildly amusing things without realizing it. Thirdly, there is basically no plot to this book so the noise of my new workplace didn't cause me too much stress in listening.

The book, as you might guess, is about the Willoughby family, who take "dysfunctional" to a whole new level. Not only do the parents and children absolutely not care about each other, they in fact both decide to get rid of the other — the children by sending their parents on an incredibly dangerous vacation sure to orphan them, the parents by going on said vacation, hiring a nanny for the kids, and then putting their house up for sale. There is also a B plot about a baby left on the Willoughbys' doorstep and subsequently left by the Willoughbys on someone else's doorstep that ends in an extended bit about a candy bar. It makes sense... sort of...

What really makes this book wonderful is that it is a self-described and completely shameless play on every children's book ever. Lowry name-drops several books, including The Bobbsey Twins series (for one book where they find a baby on their doorstep) and James and the Giant Peach (for general orphan fun times), and helpfully includes them in a bibliography at the end of the book. There is also a glossary which is nearly as amusing as the book. I may need to obtain this book in print just for those.

Recommendation: For anyone who has ever read a children's book and found it a little trite.

Rating: 9/10
(A to Z Challenge)

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook, by Eleanor Davis

I love volunteering at the library. The other day I found myself roped into hanging out in the children's section, shelving their series and "display" books, which usually means graphic novels. One of those latter books was this one, which I grabbed right off the cart and kept with me through all the rest of the sorting and shelving I did that day, just so no one else could take it from me!

And I am very glad I did. This is an excellent book! We have our hero, Julian Calendar (teehee), who is a Big Ol' Nerd but sees a chance to reinvent himself when his family moves to a new school district. Of course, being a Big Ol' Nerd is not a curable disease, and so Julian finds his new persona slipping away rather quickly. Luckily, there are some other kids in school who are equally as nerdy, and they group together to form a Secret Science Alliance (with an AWESOME secret hideout) with the goal of inventing things useful to 11-year-olds, like secret message pens and a flying machine. Unfortunately, these things are also useful to crotchety old inventors who are too lazy to do their own work...

I adored this story and the wonderfully crammed illustrations that go with it, and I'm pondering getting this for my 12-year-old brother who loves science-y things. There's so much stuff to look at that it will definitely do well under incessant re-reading, which is always a good thing. :)

Recommendation: For Big Ol' Nerds, especially those with ADD who will have lots of shiny things to look at.

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

See also:
Book Nut

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

The Carnivorous Carnival, by Lemony Snicket

The last of the Unfortunate Events this time around. Not sure when we'll be moving on, but there are only four to go! We will make it!

In this adventure, the Baudelaires have hopped in Count Olaf's trunk after the burning of Heimlich Hospital, figuring that Olaf is good at evading the law and also knows something about their potentially living parent, so who better to follow than the guy who wants to kill 2/3 of them? Oh dear. In an ironic twist, the Baudelaires disguise themselves as carnival workers and pass undetected even right under the nose of Olaf himself. For a while.

So this one I like a heck of a lot better than The Hostile Hospital, largely because it makes me happy to know that Count Olaf is an idiot. The big thing is the not seeing through the Baudelaire's disguises, because come on, but also it turns out that Olaf has been seeing a psychic to find out where the Baudelaires have been hiding from him, but of course she's not actually psychic and is using things like newspapers to find the children. I would say that Olaf might be illiterate, but he did write a play that one time... nope. Just a lazy idiot. I would hate to think that a smart person was so evil.

Recommendation: Tim Curry. Precocious children. Violence and sloppy eating. How can you go wrong?

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Hostile Hospital, by Lemony Snicket

The second Unfortunate Event of our road trip! I may have possibly slept through part of this book, but I've read it before and Scott caught me up with what I missed, so I think I'm all right. :)

So in this one, the Baudelaires have escaped VFD just barely ahead of the law, hopping on a convenient bus that takes them to Heimlich Hospital along with a group of crazy hippie people who think that singing cheerfully about awful illnesses and handing out heart-shaped balloons will make patients feel better. I think it would make me more ill. Anyway, they sneak in and are again conveniently assigned to work in a library of records, in which there is conveniently located a Snicket file which mentions the Baudelaires, except that it's mostly missing. Oh, and also Count Olaf has figured out where they are and also wants this Snicket file which he doesn't know is mostly missing and he is pretty insane at this point and that is a bad thing.

This is not one of my favorites of the series, because I felt like there were just too many conveniences. I'm not usually too hard on a plot contrivance or two, but this book is just filled with unlikely things that help someone a bit too much. My disbelief fell right to the ground.

On the other hand, I like that Snicket delves into the good/evil grey area in this book, with the Baudelaires doing some things — trickery and disguise — that make them wonder if they're not being just as evil as Count Olaf. Snicket doesn't really give an answer, either, which I like a lot. The series is definitely getting more grown-up in ideas as it ages.

Recommendation: Again, Tim Curry. Come on. Also good brain candy.

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

See also:
[your link here]

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

The Vile Village, by Lemony Snicket

Hey, look, another road trip happened! You'll be seeing this and two more Series of Unfortunate Events posts over the next several days. These books are just so perfect for driving — they're simple, they're engaging but not so much that you cause an accident, and they are easy to pick up again after you've taken a pee break. They should clearly list these qualities on the CD case.

Okay, so, we pick up on the V.F.D. thing in this book with a trip to a town called V.F.D., where the citizens have decided to take part in an orphan-raising program based on the idea that it takes a village to raise a child. Yes, you can groan.

The Baudelaires find a friend in the town handyman, who helps them attempt to decipher notes that are clearly coming from the Quagmire triplets but who is too "skittish" to do any good defending of the orphans when Count Olaf comes waltzing into town accusing the orphans of murder. Oh, snap.

In the last book, the series got an overarching storyline (finding V.F.D), but this book radically changes the way that the Baudelaires will follow that storyline, as they go from "orphans being shipped around the greater Earth area to increasingly inappropriate guardians" to "orphans running around the greater Earth area trying to find V.F.D. and also avoid the people who think they're murderers." I don't really remember the rest of this series very well, so I don't know if this is a good shift or not, but it definitely makes the series a bit easier to bear over the next couple of books, as you'll soon see.

Recommendation: I really like this series, even if it's not exactly "good." You should read this if you like sarcastic humor, and you should listen to this if you like Tim Curry.

Rating: 8/10
(A to Z Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

When You Reach Me, by Rebecca Stead

This is a pretty spectacular book, not leastly because it references A Wrinkle in Time, one of my favorite books and also a favorite of the main character, Miranda.

There's no real way to summarize this book, because it's largely confusing, but let's look at a couple paragraphs from the opening pages:

"I check the box under my bed, which is where I've kept your notes these past few months. There it is, in your tiny handwriting: April 27th: Studio TV-15, the words all jerky-looking, like you wrote them on the subway. Your last 'proof.'

"I still think about the letter you asked me to write. It nags at me, even though you're gone and there's no one to give it to anymore. Sometimes I work on it in my head, trying to map out the story you asked me to tell, about everything that happened this past fall and winter. It's all still there, like a movie I can watch when I want to. Which is never."

Dude. Love it.

So over the next couple hundred pages, Miranda basically lays out the story that this mysterious note-writer is asking her about, which involves normal everyday 12-year-old things like going to school, falling out with a friend, making new friends, avoiding the homeless guy on the corner, getting a parent ready to compete on The $20,000 Pyramid... okay, maybe not entirely normal, but not abnormal, either. And of course it gets even less normal when Miranda starts getting notes from someone who seems to know a lot more about Miranda's life than she's entirely comfortable with.

But the notes and the whole Wrinkle-y sci-fi aspect are practically unimportant for most of the story, which is what I think sells this book to me more than anything. I love a good tesser as much as the next person (or probably more), but I love the time that Stead spends developing Miranda and making me really root for her even when she's doing some stupid stuff. And she weaves the weird notes and such in extremely well, so that when you find out what's going on (well, to the extent that you do), you're like, "Ohhhhhhh, nice!" rather than, "Well, DUH." Which is probably harder to do than I think it is.

Basically, you should just go read this book. Now. Go.

Recommendation: The last sentence, unless you are really against things that make your head hurt a little bit. Just a little. It's more like a tingle. And often like a tickle.

Rating: 9.5/10
(Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
Stainless Steel Droppings
At Home With Books
Maw Books Blog
Library Queue

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

Harriet the Spy, by Louise Fitzhugh

When I was in elementary school, I had a Spy Club. My two best friends (at the time) and I would go out into the neighborhood and write down what was going on, no matter how boring it was, and then we would meet in my room to discuss. I don't know for certain, but I can only imagine that this was brought about by me reading Harriet the Spy.

As such, I have very fond memories of this book, in which one Harriet M. Welsch spies on people for fun, writing down everything she thinks about them from the mundane to the mean. Then, as these things go, Harriet's notebook gets picked up by her schoolmates, who find out just what Harriet thinks about them (focusing on the mean things, of course) and completely shun her. Then, in my memory, Harriet does something nice and everyone is friends again.

Spoiler: that is totally not the case! Oh my goodness. I had completely blocked from my mind how terrible of a person Harriet is. When her notebook is revealed to everyone, her first stop is the stationery store (this is an old book) to get a new notebook for writing down even more vicious things than before. And what brings her back to her friends is lying. Lying! She gets told by her former nanny that little white lies are very important for getting along in society, and so she just tells everyone j/k, lol, she was totally lying about all of those things she said. And apparently the other students believe her, even though they've been reading Harriet's mean screeds about other people in the school newspaper. Mmmmmmmmhmm.

So now, on the one hand, I feel very differently about Harriet. I'm even a little scandalized. But on the other hand, I have different fingers, and also I love this book a little more because it is so honest about how life tends to be. Granted, I'm not sure that Harriet would ever actually be accepted back into her old circles, but I can certainly believe that her friends would at least try to forgive her. I definitely see the Harriet of seven days after this book ends already getting in trouble again.

Recommendation: Perhaps this should be read by older kids, or at least ones mature enough not to take the ending as a license to lie all willy-nilly. Also good for adults who have a disposition toward schadenfreude.

Rating: 9/10
(Flashback Challenge)

See also:
Book Nut
Bermudaonion's Weblog

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

Matilda, by Roald Dahl

Oh, Matilda. This was my first-ever Dahl book, and in fact the only one I'd read until reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory this January. Good thing I bought that boxed set, so I can catch up!

Anyway, I read this in fifth grade as part of the not-yet-awesome Project Plus gifted program in my elementary school, and it was pretty much the greatest thing we did all year, or at least the most memorable. What smart 11-year-old doesn't wish for super powers beyond just being good at math and reading? Not me, that's for sure. I tried for weeks to move pencils and whatnot off of desks before realizing that my life wasn't quite crappy enough for making magic happen.

If you haven't read Matilda, I highly recommend it — it's the story of an incredibly precocious girl whose parents couldn't care less about her, who ends up at a school with a terrible headmistress but a wonderful teacher who helps Matilda realize her potential, both in school and in a bit of magic.

Of course, if you have kids of your own you might want to keep this out of their hands for a while, because Matilda isn't a little angel... she is very good at exacting revenge on those who make life difficult for her. At the very least, make sure that your peroxide and superglue are well hidden for several months after any nearby children read this book!

Recommendation: Excellent for precocious children, or former precocious children, or people who like to read about precocious children. Now precocious doesn't look like a word anymore.

Rating: 10/10
(Flashback Challenge)

See also:
Book Nut

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

The Clue of the Broken Locket, by Carolyn Keene

It was kind of a bad idea to read this book basically immediately after reading In the Woods, but it was all I had left to read so that's what happened!

It's your average Nancy Drew story... we have doubles, and a sinking canoe, and someone trapped in a house... I could probably go on, but I just don't want to think about this too hard.

Sadly, I think I'm going to have to call it quits on the Nancy Drew Challenge. I've gotten through 11 of the 56, and I think the other 45 are just going to have to wait until next year. Or the year after. Or when I'm really old and can make my descendents read them to me — they are so much easier to take in audio form!

Rating: 5/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Library Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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

Password to Larkspur Lane, by Carolyn Keene

Did you know that there is an International Federation of American Homing Pigeon Fanciers? Neither did I, until I read this book! Oh, homing pigeons. You're so useful for nefarious purposes.

Right, so, Nancy manages to intercept one of these delightful pigeons as it falls out of a plane, and it has a cryptic message about blue bells and whatnot and therefore Nancy just knows it's a mystery! Fun times! And then her dear friend Helen Corning (now Archer) comes to Nancy with another mystery happening to her relatives out on their estate, and Nancy's all, I can solve both of these at the same time! But, if you've been following along, you know that these two cases end up intertwined.

Sadly, there is no chloroforming or drowning. But there is disguise and escape and Nancy being thrown into a hole, so we know it's still our Nancy Drew. :)

Rating: 7/10
(Nancy Drew Challenge, Support Your Local Libary Challenge)

See also:
[your link here]

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