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.