Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Nine: Lady of Magick

So Sylvia Izzo Hunter has finally published a sequel to The Midnight Queen, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!  She employs the same pseudo-Regency style of writing as in the first book and crafts another intricate plot set mostly in the same alternate-history Europe (this time focusing on Scotland, alias Alba) in which Roman gods are worshipped in Britain, which excludes Scotland but includes northwestern France.  I did find the pacing of Lady of Magick a bit slow through the first half or even two thirds of the novel, but when the action came at the end, there was plenty of it--almost feeling a bit rushed.  Even so, I had fun reading this sequel to The Midnight Queen, and I will read any further sequels Hunter may publish in the future.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty Eight: Year of the Griffin

So, after trying and failing to become interested in Bone Gap, which was this year's Printz award winner (for excellence in writing for young adults), I decided to give it up and read something I knew I'd enjoy, Year of the Griffin, sequel to Dark Lord of Derkholm which I reviewed only a few posts previously.  I have not yet gone wrong with a book by Diana Wynne Jones, and Year of the Griffin was no exception!  I enjoyed it at least as much as Dark Lord of Derkholm, and possibly more.  I was only sad that it ended so soon!  But enough in that vein.  As for the book itself, it takes place eight years after the events of Derkholm, focusing on Derk's youngest griffin daughter, Elda, now 18, in her first year at the Wizards' University, which is in financial and magical chaos due to poor (and somewhat corrupt) administration.  Elda and her friends at university add a good heap of excitement to the campus, intentionally and not, making this another novel in Jones's excellent tradition of stories with deliciously complex, multi-layered plots with lots of dynamic and slightly mysterious characters.  If you enjoy fantasy novels and complex plots, this is definitely the book for you--though do read Dark Lord of Derkholm first.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Seven: The Weight of Feathers

As per a suggestion, I went ahead and read The Weight of Feathers, by Anna-Marie McLemore.  This recent YA novel follows two teenagers, Cluck Corbeau and Lace Paloma, who belong to rival families (think Romeo and Juliet).  Unlike Shakespeare's play, this story shares the narration between our two star-crossed protagonists, with the quotation in French (Cluck) or Spanish (Lace) informing the reader which character is narrating the chapter ahead.  At first The Weight of Feathers felt a bit too much like Romeo and Juliet for my taste, and each family's internal reinforcing of the evils wrought by the other family was a bit tiresome and obviously untrue or inaccurate.  However, as the story unfolded, it felt less like a modern remake of the play and more like an original story, becoming more nuanced and enjoyable.  I found myself really caring about both protagonists and wanting to find out what would happen to them; by the midpoint I could hardly put the book down.  However, I wasn't a huge fan of this story's version of magical realism (I might not like magical realism that much ever, actually).  I tend to prefer either realism or fantasy straight up, and I found the few magical aspects of this story somewhat distracting since they were unexplained (as they tend to be in works of magical realism).  Even so, I found this to be a compelling read, and if you like teen novels, or magical realism, or love stories, or award-winners (it was a finalist for the YA Morris Award for best debut author this year), then I'd recommend The Weight of Feathers.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Six: Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans

So, inspired by an upcoming trip to New Orleans, I decided I wanted to read some current travel-ish writing on the city, which I've visited briefly once before (and whose literature I took a superb undergrad class on).  Perusing my library's catalog, I found this title by Roy Blount Jr., whose name I recognized from listening to Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me, so I decided to check it out.  Feet on the Street certainly engages in the kind of fetishization of New Orleans that so much of the writing on that city I've read also employs--it seems rather inevitable, but it isn't unpleasant once you've resigned yourself to it.  This is certainly a rambling book, but that seems to capture the flavor of the city as Blount depicts it: laid-back, meandering (or at least the Mississippi River is, but how can one separate river from city in this case?), not driven by a point or a goal but by a certain joie de vivre.  Much time is spent discussing oysters, but this is an interesting (and short!) slice of life in New Orleans as one outsider has experienced it on his numerous visits there.  Also, it's made me want to re-read A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams and The Awakening by Kate Chopin...  If you like contemporary travel writing, or books about New Orleans, I'd suggest Feet on the Street.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Five: Most Dangerous: Daniel Ellsberg and the Secret History of the Vietnam War

I've been meaning to read this non-fiction teen book, the latest from award-winning author Steve Sheinkin, ever since I read reviews of it last fall.  I finally checked it out from the library, and then lo and behold, at yesterday morning's Youth Media Awards at the ALA Midwinter Conference, it won the prize for Excellence in Nonfiction for Young Adults awarded by YALSA (the Young Adult Library Services Association, part of the American Library Association).  So I bumped it to the top of my list of library books to be read next (though I have mixed feelings about reading books just because they've won an award).  Although this book is written for teens, it did not feel dumbed down or over-simplified (perhaps this is due to my overwhelming ignorance about the Vietnam War and the Pentagon Papers, but I think not), and I found it to be a clear and compelling overview of how Daniel Ellsberg evolved from a U.S. Marine and a firm Cold Warrior into the anti-war activist who leaked top-secret government documents to newspapers across the country.  This book portrays Ellsberg in a favorable light while also emphasizing the complexity of any decision-making and is likely to raise many questions and strong feelings (whether favorable or not) in its readers.  I found it a fascinating look into a war and era I know little about, and I would recommend it to anyone who wants an introduction to the topic, or who enjoys nonfiction about history or government, or who simply wants an interesting read.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Four: Dark Lord of Derkholm

When looking for the book I read before Dark Lord of Derkholm, I came across that library's YA holdings by Diana Wynne Jones, one of my very favorite authors.  She has written dozens of books, most of which I haven't read (now that she's died, I don't want to go through them all too quickly--I'm sort of rationing them out).  But I decided it had been too long since I've read one of her books, and Dark Lord of Derkholm is a new title to me.  (It is also a fairly long book, which appealed to me because when I like a world I want to spend a good bit of time there, though it ended up reading pretty quickly, maybe because I hated to put it down!)  Anyway, Dark Lord of Derkholm was a delight, full of Jones's particular brand of humor, with a large yet interesting cast of characters, a mix of traditional mythologic influences and a unique version of magic, and a complex (some might say convoluted) multi-layer plot that ends up coming together quite nicely by the end, as her books tend to do.  If Dark Lord of Derkholm does feel like many of the other books by Jones (at least the ones I've read), that only made it more enjoyable for me, and it was certainly never predictable!  This is probably not the best book to choose if you are brand new to fantasy (or dislike fantasy), but if you enjoy fantasy and especially if you've enjoyed other books by Jones, I definitely recommend Dark Lord of Derkholm!

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Three: The Summer Prince

Alaya Dawn Johnson's first book, The Summer Prince, is set in a fictitious far-future post-nuclear fallout enclosed city in what in our time is Brazil.  This book takes some of the best elements of post-apocalyptic and dystopian teen fiction and includes them suggestively, without being too overbearing or heavy-handed.   (Not to say that some dystopian elements are not obvious and brutal, in the post-Hunger Games tradition: a main plot point is that, every five years, the city elects a king who will be sacrificed at the end of a one-year term.)  Numerous minor and fascinating details about some of this future society's rules are slipped in throughout the text, helping create a very textured and realistic world, or at least the city of Palmares Três feels very realistic--the rest of the world is tantalizingly vague, which makes sense since the protagonist, June, has never left her glass-pyramid enclosed home city.  And as for June, she reads like many teenage characters do: passionate, creative, intelligent, and very angry with her mother (largely due to the death of her father) and lashing out at her new step-mother, too.  Her anguished relationship with her mother feels just a bit overblown and tired--haven't we seen this before in teen literature?--but the saving grace is that June's relationship with her mother is (slightly) dynamic, and June at least sometimes engages in self-reflexive thinking about her anger at and relationship with her mother, leading to some growth.  Another aspect of this book that I appreciated was its natural inclusion of a diverse array of characters, which can be hard to find in popular literature.

One of my library science/children's literature classmates recommended this book to me, and I'm so glad I took the recommendation and read it.  I could hardly bear to put it down because it kept me guessing until the end, and I would heartily recommend it.  Readers who enjoyed Lois Lowry's The Giver (and sequels), Suzanne Collins's Hunger Games trilogy, M.T. Andersen's Feed, or similar books will probably especially enjoy The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson, or if you are looking for a way into the teen dystopian/post-apocalyptic adventure novel, this would be an excellent starting point.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-Two Across

I couldn't resist making a little play on words in the title of this post, which is about a book called Two Across, a debut novel by Jeff Bartsch.  My grandmother sent me this book a few months ago, and I've finally had time to read it.  I love the premise of the book, which follows two over-educated teenagers, Vera and Stanley, from their tie at the National Spelling Bee when they are both 15 through their very tumultuous relationship, in which an odd importance is given to coded messages they send each other in crossword puzzles they construct and have published in major newspapers.  Stanley and Vera are both intriguing characters, though I often found Stanley in particular to be rather frustrating.  This book kept my interest, though by the last third or quarter of the book, it was starting to feel irritatingly repetitive.  (Boy loses girl and regains girl via crossword puzzles... and makes the same stupid mistake and loses her again... and finds her again via crossword puzzles... and makes a similar stupid mistake and loses her again... repeat several times...)  However, I found the ending to be generally satisfactory, which I value in a novel.  One element I disliked was the emotionally distant tone, especially in this novel that focuses on the turbulent relationship between two people in their late teenage years and in their twenties.  I prefer novels where I am made to feel the characters' emotions, rather than being told briefly and periodically about their emotions as though they are mere details rather than the glue of daily life.  This sort of emotional distance in the writing seems to me to be characteristic of a certain type of contemporary fiction for adults (I'm thinking, for example, of The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House by Rebecca Makkai, and of The Magicians by Lev Grossman, all previously reviewed on this blog).  Despite the emotional distance and repetitive plot toward the end, the story had many original elements, and I found this book to be fairly engaging.  If you enjoy contemporary U.S. fiction for adults, or stories with lots of quirk, or stories set in the 1960s and 1970s, I'd recommend this book.

Chapter One Hundred Fifty-One: My Life in France

In this autobiography by well-known chef Julia Child, she recounts how she came to learn and love cooking from her first stay in France in the late 1940s and 1950s and how she turned what started as a personal interest in cooking into a successful career as a cookbook writer and television chef.  Child also includes numerous details of her daily life (along with her husband and helper Paul) in France, Germany, Norway, and the U.S. through the early 1990s.  There are also hearty helpings of her political leanings and the tensions these caused with her father, as well as her views on American and French culture, though the focus of the book always remains on cooking and food.  By her account in My Life in France (co-written with a grand-nephew), her life was generally a happy one, despite the stresses and strains that come along with celebrity, and she certainly led an interesting life as well.  Even as someone who is relatively uninterested in food and cooking, I found this a fascinating and cheerful account of an interesting life well lived, and I would certainly recommend it to readers interested in the cultures of France and the U.S. in the late twentieth century or in biographies of chefs, or of women, or in books about generally happy people.  

Coincidentally, I have recently encountered two other books that involve Julia Child, but neither made it onto this blog originally, as one is a picture book and the other I listened to as an audiobook.  But I heartily enjoyed both of them, and as they're on the same subject, I'd like to mention them here.  The first is Minette's Feast: The Delicious Story of Julia Child and her Cat by Susanna Reich, a really charming picture book mainly about Julia Child's cat, Minette (whom Child discusses in My Life in France).  If you want an adorable picture book about a happy cat, Minette's Feast is a great choice.  The second is Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste by Luke Barr, which gives some context to Child's career and offers a wider perspective on some of the events mentioned in My Life in France.  A nonfiction book, it provides a history of the evolution of food culture in the U.S. of the late twentieth century.