Parenthetical.net

Now that the Cybils winners are all official ‘n stuff, I can review the finalists from the Middle Grade Fantasy & Science Fiction category. Here they are, in one speedy blowout:

The Prince of Fenway Park, Julianna Baggott
Check this premise, people: the famous Curse on [...]

[Read more →]

This recent xkcd makes an excellent point. This is why I always loved the end of Labyrinth when all the critters tell Sarah that they’ll come “should you need us” — and then she cries that she needs them and they come rock out in her bedroom! Because they didn’t just mean the [...]

[Read more →]

The premise is pretty cool: unicorns are vicious killers which were wiped out several generations ago… but now they seem to be back, attacking people in the modern world. Our heroine joins up with a group of… Slayers, basically, who all have a Great Destiny (blech) to send the unicorns back to extinction.
In the [...]

[Read more →]

Via Deborah at Gnomic Utterance: Tu Publishing will be a small press “dedicated to publishing fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and historical fiction for children and young adults inspired by many cultures from around the world….” They plan to start acquiring their first two books, which will be fantasy or science fiction, in January.
It’s exciting [...]

[Read more →]

I’m not even going to try to summarize this one, except to say: interweaving of Snow White & Rose Red, Rumpelstiltskin, and probably some other tales into a lyrical novel with the most sexual creepiness I have had the misfortune to encounter in awhile. This is an excellent example of a book marketed to [...]

[Read more →]

How did I escape my nerdy fantasy-loving adolescence without ever reading this book? I’m not sure, but I intend to correct the oversight in my Twilight-loving students. Beauty has all the creature-of-the-night broody romance of Edward and Bella, with a little more self-actualization.
You know the story: Beauty’s dad gets lost in the woods [...]

[Read more →]

My main gripe with the first Bartimaeus was how much Nathaniel’s chapters dragged as compared with Bartimaeus’s. The Golem’s Eye ameliorates this problem by giving us plenty of the ever-delightful Bartimaeus, and adding a third point of view: Kitty, the young Resistance leader. Nathaniel is also older now, and more of a love-to-hate [...]

[Read more →]

What I didn’t want to announce when I read the first Bartimaeus (because it was still in the works) was that I read it in preparation for a school visit from its author! He was here yesterday, signing loads of books and talking to my middle schoolers about the writing process.
He read [...]

[Read more →]

Quickie backlog Cybils review:
Beautifully detailed line drawings and a wordless story featuring young Ivy “and her gifted Korgi cub, Sprout.” The Characters page in the back describes Korgis as “loyal, fox-like creatures with big ears and large smiles.” Do they look an awful lot like Welsh corgis? Gosh, they do! Does [...]

[Read more →]

Nathaniel is a magician’s apprentice in modern London. In his England, magicians control everything: the Prime Minister is the most powerful, and the rest of the government is made up of other magicians, all constantly jockeying for power and full of contempt for “commoners” (ie., everyone else). What the commoners don’t know is [...]

[Read more →]