Chapter Forty-Two: A Sudden Wild Magic

I'm so glad that my local branch of the Boston Public Library has a really solid collection of books by Diana Wynne Jones!  I really enjoy her, but I've had trouble finding a good selection of her numerous works in bookstores and at other libraries.  So now that I have access, watch out for more of her books on my blog in the near future!  Anyway, I'm glad I had the chance to check out this book of hers that I haven't read.  I quite enjoyed it, in large part because of her flair for the odd and her generous helpings of humor.  Moreover,  A Sudden Wild Magic provides a complex plot with many threads that all weave together to form into a fascinating whole.  This book is on the long side, and it's definitely worth the effort to read it in its entirety.  I heartily enjoyed it and recommend it to anyone looking for a funky, funny fantasy.

Chapter Forty-One: The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Now that I've finally had time to join the Boston Public Library, I've been making good use of my local branch to check out some new books.  I was intrigued by the title of this novel by Aimee Bender--what would make lemon cake sad?--and then I was drawn in by the original premise for this story: when she eats food, the protagonist can taste in it the emotions of the person who prepared it.  This book reads quickly, and a feeling of mystery that pervades the plot makes it hard to put this book down until the very end.  The only aspect that I disliked is Bender's proclivity for peppering her otherwise pleasant prose with sentence fragments; this rubbed me the wrong way.  However, overall I enjoyed this book and I would recommend it to anyone looking for an interesting read.

Chapter Forty: Tales of the Willows Trilogy

This trilogy (The Willows in Winter, Toad Triumphant, and The Willows and Beyond) by William Horwood is a great extension of Kenneth Grahame's Wind in the Willows.  He stays true to Grahame's Rat, Mole, Toad, Badger, and Otter, and his additional characters and expansion of Portly are delightful.  He also does a pretty good job of staying stylistically close to Grahame's prose in The Wind in the Willows, although a careful reader might notice some differences, and occasionally I detected a whiff of satire in Horwood's prose, although this was not necessarily a problem.  I absolutely love the additional adventures Horwood has created for these characters and the added emotional depth they assume over the course of this trilogy; I almost cried at points during the last book.  These are a great read for anyone who loves The Wind in the Willows and who wonders what might have happened to Ratty, Mole, Badger, Otter, and--of course--Toad after the end of Grahame's classic.

Chapter Thirty-Nine: The Wind in the Willows

I've always loved this book; its idyllic, pastoral setting and its varied cast of animal characters (or are they meant to be caricatures?) are so lovable.  It's easy for me to see why this story by Kenneth Grahame is still a classic after more than 100 years.  Even though it requires a bit of patience to read some of the slower sentences and passages, this story is well worth the effort.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Tuck Everlasting

What better way is there to pass a hot August afternoon than sitting in the shade with a tall iced tea and rereading this classic by Natalie Babbitt?  After all, this whole book is, at heart, a paean to the end of summer, both in a literal and figurative sense as the narrator draws our attention to the inevitable descent into autumn from August and the descent (which ought to be inevitable) of human lives from the prime of their youth towards death.  Aside from the pleasure of reading a book about August during August, the characters and plot are intriguing, but what really draws me into this text, time and again, is Babbitt's prose.  I can never resist reading at least the prologue aloud: the sound of the words and sentences fits so perfectly with their meaning, and somehow Babbitt manages to create a feeling of great gravity and portent without having the writing seem contrived or corny.  This novella is a delightful way to while away a slow summer afternoon, but even in the dead of winter, this book is worth reading.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: The Witches

This is another of my all-time favorite Roald Dahl novels.  When I first read this book as a child, Dahl's version of witches scared me more than most other things!  His witches terrified me in a fascinating, almost-plausible, fantastic way.  For a few days I was pretty sure one was going to ambush me while in the shower (even though that would be totally out of character for them).  In addition to his delightfully unique rendering of witches, Dahl includes liberal doses of humor in The Witches (as he does in most all of his writing, which is part of why I love his writing so), and the whole package is rounded off nicely by the saving-children-from-evil element.  In sum: this book is great.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls

Seeing as I'm about to be working with middle-schoolers, when my mom found this book on her shelf, she suggested I read it.  It seemed interesting, and potentially pertinent, I decided to take a break from my steady diet of fiction to delve into this non-fiction text based on the author's own experiences as a therapist working with adolescent girls and their families.  Even though Mary Pipher was writing from Lincoln, Nebraska in the 1990s, I felt that a lot of what she describes in this book matches with my own not-too-distant experiences as a female adolescent and also with what I've noticed while working with middle-school girls as a babysitter and camp counselor.  Reading this book even prompted me to do some self-reflection on how my own experiences as a teenager still influence who I am and how I think of myself today.  On the downside, I often found the content to be rather heavy despite Pipher's explanations of how we can counteract the cultural forces that can make adolescence so difficult for girls, but the subject was so interesting (at least to me) that I was willing to keep reading all the way to the end.  I definitely found this to be a thought-provoking read.