recent reads
A few more quick reviews.
Nine Pound Hammer by John Claude Bemis is a delightful, action-packed story that centers around the American tall tale of John Henry. Ray, an orphan, teams up with some other folks who travel by steam train in a Medicine Show, performing stunts and hawking herbs and medicine across the eastern part of the US. They are on the run from the evil force that John Henry used his nine pound hammer to fight, a force called the Gog. Though the book seemed a bit plot-driven at the expense of the characters, and the antagonist was not really well-defined, the entertaining story kept me going. The book is the first in a planned trilogy, but it had a satisfying ending. The Victorian steampunk setting was fun and I'm looking forward to the next book. I had the pleasure of meeting the author at a signing recently (he lives in NC) and he was gracious and pretty adorable.
I picked up an ARC of Witch & Wizard by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet at the AASL conference, and the kids at my school are going to love it. The dialogue is spot-on teenspeak, and the story moves fast and furiously. The sister and brother main characters are arrested by the New World Order because they're suspected of being...well, a witch and a wizard. They have to bust out of prison and meet up with other renegade children determined to fight the new government. It's the first book in a new series, and it's going to be a big hit with younger teens.
I'm sorry I put off reading the first book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy for so long. One of my students had been bugging me for ages to read it, and finally brought The Amulet of Samarkand up and put it in my hands and ordered me to read it. :) Bartemaeus is great; and I hope I can get to the second book before too long. The series is by Jonathan Stroud.
My mom urged me to read The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, and even though it's not my usual thing (a non-fiction memoir? ugh, Mom, really) I read it and am glad I did. It's an adult book and tells the story of the author's life as she grew up in the 60s and 70s in one of the most whacked-out families you can imagine. She and her three siblings were horribly neglected by their alcoholic father and self-centered mother. The parents were very eccentric--intelligent and shrewd yet detached from reality in how they saw themselves and the way they were raising their family. The children were fiercely loyal to their parents, like many neglected children are, and hid their hunger and needs from others. By the end of the book, when the author was an adult, the parents were homeless, living on the streets of NYC and not unhappy with this life. The writing is a marvel--the story is told objectively from a child's POV, and is never depressing. When the mother comes out with her bizarre "truisms" they have a acerbic, absurd James Thurber-ish feel to them. I highly recommend this one.
I'm glad I read Fire by Kristin Cashore--I liked it even better than Graceling. The characters in this book are completely separate from those in the first one (with one exception) and it takes place in a different country, far from Katsa's Monsea. There are no people with graces; instead, there are monsters of every species--insects, animals and human. Fire is the one existing human monster, born of a monster father and human mother. She can control the minds of people and animals, and is so devastatingly beautiful that others want to love her or kill her, unless they can close their minds to her. She becomes embroiled in the politics of the royal family, and must overcome the legacy of her father and decide whether to use her powers to help the king. I liked Fire better than Katsa, but this is mere personal taste. The love interest in this book, like Po, is too good to be true, and all the talk of Fire's menstrual periods got old, but I enjoyed it. I saw more similarities between Cashore's writing and Megan Whalen Turner's than I remember seeing while reading the first book, but maybe I'm just so pumped about A Conspiracy of Kings that I'm thinking about it all the time.
Nine Pound Hammer by John Claude Bemis is a delightful, action-packed story that centers around the American tall tale of John Henry. Ray, an orphan, teams up with some other folks who travel by steam train in a Medicine Show, performing stunts and hawking herbs and medicine across the eastern part of the US. They are on the run from the evil force that John Henry used his nine pound hammer to fight, a force called the Gog. Though the book seemed a bit plot-driven at the expense of the characters, and the antagonist was not really well-defined, the entertaining story kept me going. The book is the first in a planned trilogy, but it had a satisfying ending. The Victorian steampunk setting was fun and I'm looking forward to the next book. I had the pleasure of meeting the author at a signing recently (he lives in NC) and he was gracious and pretty adorable.
I picked up an ARC of Witch & Wizard by James Patterson and Gabrielle Charbonnet at the AASL conference, and the kids at my school are going to love it. The dialogue is spot-on teenspeak, and the story moves fast and furiously. The sister and brother main characters are arrested by the New World Order because they're suspected of being...well, a witch and a wizard. They have to bust out of prison and meet up with other renegade children determined to fight the new government. It's the first book in a new series, and it's going to be a big hit with younger teens.
I'm sorry I put off reading the first book in the Bartimaeus Trilogy for so long. One of my students had been bugging me for ages to read it, and finally brought The Amulet of Samarkand up and put it in my hands and ordered me to read it. :) Bartemaeus is great; and I hope I can get to the second book before too long. The series is by Jonathan Stroud.
My mom urged me to read The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls, and even though it's not my usual thing (a non-fiction memoir? ugh, Mom, really) I read it and am glad I did. It's an adult book and tells the story of the author's life as she grew up in the 60s and 70s in one of the most whacked-out families you can imagine. She and her three siblings were horribly neglected by their alcoholic father and self-centered mother. The parents were very eccentric--intelligent and shrewd yet detached from reality in how they saw themselves and the way they were raising their family. The children were fiercely loyal to their parents, like many neglected children are, and hid their hunger and needs from others. By the end of the book, when the author was an adult, the parents were homeless, living on the streets of NYC and not unhappy with this life. The writing is a marvel--the story is told objectively from a child's POV, and is never depressing. When the mother comes out with her bizarre "truisms" they have a acerbic, absurd James Thurber-ish feel to them. I highly recommend this one.
I'm glad I read Fire by Kristin Cashore--I liked it even better than Graceling. The characters in this book are completely separate from those in the first one (with one exception) and it takes place in a different country, far from Katsa's Monsea. There are no people with graces; instead, there are monsters of every species--insects, animals and human. Fire is the one existing human monster, born of a monster father and human mother. She can control the minds of people and animals, and is so devastatingly beautiful that others want to love her or kill her, unless they can close their minds to her. She becomes embroiled in the politics of the royal family, and must overcome the legacy of her father and decide whether to use her powers to help the king. I liked Fire better than Katsa, but this is mere personal taste. The love interest in this book, like Po, is too good to be true, and all the talk of Fire's menstrual periods got old, but I enjoyed it. I saw more similarities between Cashore's writing and Megan Whalen Turner's than I remember seeing while reading the first book, but maybe I'm just so pumped about A Conspiracy of Kings that I'm thinking about it all the time.