This is a Jellicoe Road. That’s become my shorthand for a wonderful but difficult book that I want to put down early, but stick with because a reader I trust assures me, “Stick with it; it all comes together in the end.” And so I pass this on to you: You will probably be confused. If you, like me, have limited patience for protagonists whose defining characteristic is emo self-loathing, Briony will start off annoying the crap out of you. You will be suspicious of everyone, and not sure if there’s a single character worth hanging your hat on.

That’s just what they want you to think. Stick with it; it all comes together in the end.

I hesitate to say much else, because the pleasure of this book is so much in the unfolding of secrets. The setting is a small town in Victorian England that is just getting a train station, but has an earlier-century habit of hanging witches; the descriptions are appropriately creepy and claustrophobic. This is dark stuff, on occasion, but with trademark YA uplift at the end. Briony’s language is repetitive and quirky in a way that is trying to be poetic, and will feel that way to many readers, but often the poetry felt too “high school lit mag” to me:

We were to have new clothes.

We were to have new clothes because I tried to bargain with the Boggy Mun and he outwitted me. I should feel guilty, but I don’t. Father shouldn’t feel guilty, but he does. We were to have new clothes because I made Rose sick.

This, to me, is Hell.

On and on ring the lunatic bells.

And the love story? It feels mature (such a relief). It’s not good enough to have a relationship that’s fun for awhile; oh no, in so much YA these days, he needs to be your One True Soulmate Schmoopypants, and I don’t buy it. Most of us are far too un-formed in high school to luck into our dream partner. This is one of the rare young literary relationships that I believe might actually work out.

(This is a conversation for another post, but it occurs to me that a lot of YA romances these days follow the conventions of adult romance, in that the couple needs to get married — or at least imply that they will. Paranormals, of course, often take that to the next level — they’ll get married for all eternity. Why is this? Teen romances used to have their own standards, in which a fun, healthy relationship was plenty — why isn’t that good enough anymore? Or am I wrong? While I read a lot of books with love stories (I read YA at a girls’ school library, after all), I admittedly don’t read a lot of romances. (Ever wonder why this blog is called Parenthetical? Uh-huh.))

Read-alikes: Graceling! In the way it drops you in the middle of the action, in the maturity of the love story, plus in one other way I won’t get into. It also plays with the self-hating unreliable narrator in similar ways to A Long Long Sleep.

Cover: It sucks. I hate to be that blunt, but it is exactly wrong in every way for this book. If the cover makes you go, “Ew, historical paranormal romance; over it,” you will probably like the book because it is in many ways the exact opposite of that.

Also reviewed by: Things Mean A Lot (who has some smart things to say about how this book handles gender), The Book Smugglers, The Spectacle, and Wandering Librarians.

I identified with Keri immediately because in the first chapter she explains that she likes to be prepared. She has plans for every possible disaster, keeps emergency supplies in her bedroom, that sort of thing. But of course, she does not have a plan for what to do when her beloved older brother kills himself. Unless it turns out to be murder, as her childhood friend Janna suspects. It turns out that Keri’s brother is part of a pattern of “suicides” that includes Janna’s brother, her friend Sione’s brother, and ten years’ worth of other oldest brothers, all from different parts of New Zealand, who have visited their idyllic resort town for the New Year’s festivities. The three only have a short time until New Year’s comes around again to identify this year’s victim and find the killers.

I loved Healey’s last book, Guardian of the Dead, and I loved this. For many of the same reasons: believable, flawed friendships between fully realized characters; sensitive handling of sex (and the lack thereof); a stunning sense of place. The magic felt a bit less organic here than in Guardian and required more suspension of disbelief for some reason; I kept waiting for a twist, that it wasn’t what the kids thought, but nope — it pretty much was, and was an idea we’ve all seen before, and therefore had something of a “Buffy monster-of-the-week” feel, like with established characters all of this could have happened in 50 minutes on TV.

So while this feels less original than Guardian (with the exception of the New Zealand setting, which is unusual enough to get a bunch of automatic originality points for an American audience), it was no less fun to read. I chewed through it in one day, home sick recovering from BEA. Healey is an outstanding writer with a gift for dialogue, characterization, and foreshadowing. She drops hints along the way that only seem sinister in retrospect, but doesn’t make us wait for the characters to catch up to what we’ve already figured out. And she weaves race, class, and sexuality (and, in this case, temporary disability) into the story in such a way that it feels like she’s creating real people rather than checking character traits off a PC list.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of fear in my own life, and how to avoid sacrificing long-term sanity for short-term peace of mind. I said at the beginning that I identified with Keri’s need to plan for every eventuality. At the end she says, “I still planned for possibilities, but it was easier to recognize the planning as part of the anxiety and not being about real things that might actually happen,” and it was eerily like reading words from my own head.
…

SPOILERS (which might be interesting if you’re not going to read the book, since (surprise!) I go off on a tangent)

One of my favorite things about Healey’s books is how the magic has lasting consequences — good and bad. At the end of Guardian the earthquakes had still happened and people needed to clean up afterwards. And at the end of this, people do start losing their jobs and leaving Summerton. That is the consequence of putting an end to the spell that demanded the boys as sacrifice. (It’s implied that the town is going to be okay anyway, which is maybe a cop-out considering how similar West Coast towns are described as “ghost towns.”) “Dystopia” is the big buzzword right now, but this is a dystopia in the truest sense — it aims for utopia and misses horribly, and we see that from the inside.

It made me think of Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.” (If you’ve never read it, the text is behind that link. It’s very short and I think it’s pretty much required modern reading.) To what lengths are we willing to go to keep the places we love safe and prosperous? Is there any amount of sacrifice that’s worth it? We (and here I’m making some assumptions about my readership) are, of course, all citizens of Omelas or Summerton — enjoying our cheap and plentiful fuel and food and material goods at the expense of the impoverished people who create those things for us. There are ways to walk away from Omelas, to go off the grid, but almost no one does it because the pull of the comfort and safety and community is far too strong. (And because — and this is something not allowed for in the parameters of LeGuin’s story — maybe it’s better to stay and try to change things from the inside?)

I think that’s why it took people who had been damaged by the Summerton spell to finally see the rot at the core of the town. The pain of losing their brothers was enough to intrude on the cocoon. Everyone else chose to look away, and the coven members themselves — who, like the people of Omelas (and us), know and are making a fully conscious choice — find ways to justify it.

Also reviewed by: Pink Me, Wandering Librarians, and Bookshop

I can’t believe it took me so long to read this after how much I loved the author’s Dairy Queen trilogy. Unsurprisingly, I really enjoyed this too, though it is a quite different book. Ben’s voice couldn’t be more different from DJ’s: where DJ is plainspoken and even sometimes inarticulate, Ben writes like Oscar Wilde. I was reminded of M. T. Anderson’s Octavian Nothing, written in old-fashioned language with the kind of humor that grows naturally out of such a style. It’s challenging, but entertaining enough that I think a lot of fantasy fans will push through it.

My favorite thing about the book is Ben’s growth as a character. Most of the time, the YA fantasy heroine’s arc is one of discovering self-confidence: the confidence to make her way in the world, to believe in her own competence, etc. This is, of course, a pretty common arc of real-life YAs. And it’s part of Ben’s story, but the other part is that she actually is pretty incompetent at first. She’s likeable enough, and you sympathize with her harsh treatment by the Queen… but you can also see that while the Queen maybe isn’t using the kindest methods, she does legitimately need to whip her stubborn, uneducated heir into shape. Montagne needs a Queen, and like it or not, that’s Ben’s job. Watching Ben realize that and come to take pride in her role was so satisfying. I love a heroine who screws up a lot.

My only serious objection to Princess Ben is from a fat acceptance standpoint. She’s fat, she doesn’t particularly care, she doesn’t lose weight despite the Queen’s best efforts (because dieting doesn’t necessarily work), I’m all set up for a positive fat character without a weight-loss arc… and then she returns from a climactic mid-book adventure having lost weight. Which might not have bothered me — she’s an underfed prisoner, after all — but it coincides, of course, with her maturation into a responsible future Queen. So close, Ms. Murdock, so close.

Overall, slightly offbeat castles-and-magic fantasy for fans of Shannon Hale, the Farsala trilogy, and Flora Segunda.

Also reviewed by: Abby (the) Librarian, Em’s Bookshelf, and Feminist Review.

Wisdom’s Kiss is a companion book, though you don’t really need to have read Princess Ben first. Ben is the grandmother of one of the two main characters: Queen Temperance and her younger sister Wisdom (known as Dizzy, a far more accurate description of her nature). Hoo boy, are there a lot of characters in this book! And they all get voices via letters or memoirs, plus there’s a play and an Encyclopedia of Exposition and probably some other things I’m forgetting. The plot, more or less, is that Dizzy is engaged to marry Roger, Duke of Farina. On their way to the wedding, Dizzy and Ben pick up Trudy, a bar wench who can sense the future. She’s excited to be reunited with her long-lost childhood sweetheart, Tips, who she thinks is a soldier in the capitol. It turns out that Tips has actually joined the circus, and at a performance in Dizzy’s honor, he and Dizzy fall in love at first sight. Dizzy wants out of her engagement, which is of course politically problematic, but even more so when it turns out that her wedding to Roger is all part of Roger’s ambitious mother’s plan to take over Montagne, which threatens Temperance at home.

Whew! You got all that? Yeah, me neither, a lot of the time. I commend the author for her ambition, but there’s kind of too much going on in this book. It would be fun to teach in an English class; you could do exercises on unreliable narrators, exposition, point of view, and on and on. It was a little overwhelming to read, though, and distracted me from actually getting to know any of the characters. Maybe I’m boring, but I found the more straightforward Princess Ben a much more enjoyable read.

Spoiler alert:

Trudy doesn’t end up with Tips, which I liked. That’s believable — they haven’t seen each other in 6 years, and it’s realistic that he’d move on to Dizzy. But it’s so set up that Temperance and Trudy will end up together. Trudy is pulled to Montagne by a sense of unfathomable future joy; when they meet, the narration goes on and on about how important they will become in each other’s lives; there’s even an offhand remark about how Roger’s older brother married a dude, so gay marriage is accepted in this world (though maybe not for queens who need blood heirs?). And again, Murdock gets so close and then pulls back! Trudy, we’re told, eventually marries some random guy; Temperance must marry — she has a son — though we don’t even find out to whom. Cop. Out. In my head, their marriages are shams and they love only each other.

E-galley of Wisdom’s Kiss generously provided via NetGalley.

Also reviewed by: Night Reader and The Novel Gnome.

The writing is lovely, I suppose, but I was disappointed by this book (which everyone else on the internet loves, so my opinion shouldn’t necessarily dissuade you from reading it). None of the characters felt real. The entire time I felt like I was reading through wavy glass or something — the images were beautiful, but kept at a distance, not solid.

In this world homosexuality is unquestioned (at least for women… I don’t remember any gay male couples mentioned) — that felt slightly off given the very traditional medieval fantasy trappings of the rest of the world, but okay. It was nice to read a lesbian YA fantasy in which the relationship gets to proceed like any hetero romance. And it set up a good progression from Sidhean, the otherworldly lover of her childhood who represents escape, to Kaisa, the grounded adult relationship who helps Ash want to live in reality.

But the novel brought up so many other issues that could have been fascinating but were never really explored. The story starts with a conflict between the old ways (“greenwitch” magic) and new science. Ash’s mother believes in the old magic, while her father doesn’t; it’s their major fight, and it’s implied that both died because the town greenwitch wasn’t allowed to care for them her way. The scientific medical establishment has only progressed as far as leeches, so I suppose this isn’t a surprise — but that eliminates any interesting conflict between the two ways of life. We know that fairies exist, so we know that magic works; we know that medical science is dumb because ha ha, leeches. The former is represented by Ash’s beloved mother; the latter by her abusive stepmother. It’s too easy.

And then there are the class issues. The stepmother tells Ash that her father left a lot of debt, and it’s Ash’s responsibility to work it off. She cooks, she cleans, she is her stepsisters’ ladies’ maid. We’re meant to bemoan her fall from the leisure class, but what about servants who’ve been servants all their lives? Ash befriends some of them at another house that her stepfamily visits, and they seem perfectly happy with their circumstances — is it fine just because they have better masters? And the huntress has her own servants, who simply bow in and out and are given no character at all. One of Ash’s trials as a servant is that her time is not her own, to visit Sidhean or Kaisa — what about Kaisa’s servants? Don’t they have lovers they might like to visit, rather than hovering around waiting for their mistress to call them? This is mentioned in passing, but it’s never really dealt with, and it’s something that almost always bugs me in fairy tale retellings. Why should we cheer when a character aspires to have servants but be saddened when she has to be one?

Also reviewed by: The Book Smugglers and Racebending

Okay, let’s get the totally unavoidable Harry Potter comparisons out of the way. The first third of the book is made up of the requisite “Sunny sees the magical world and starts magic school” sequences, and I couldn’t stop drawing parallels. There’s Diagon Alley Leopard Knocks, full of wonder for Sunny, where the kids buy the books they’ll need for their magical education. There’s Dumbledore Anatov, the wise teacher who tosses them into danger without ever giving them quite enough information. There’s the mysterious, dead magical relative whom Sunny’s family won’t discuss. There’s the scene where Sunny breaks a magical rule to terrify a bully and is taken to the Ministry of Magic Obi Library to be punished. And of course, there’s the team of untrained kids who must save the world.

Here’s the thing, though: it doesn’t matter. “There are only x stories in the world” and all that, and the details of this one are fabulous and original enough to distinguish itself. Okorafor’s imagination is just as boundless as Rowling’s (and in fact her magic holds together better), and she has created just as immersive a world.

And I’m kind of burying the lede here, but: it’s not a white world. Kids who love fantasy — white kids, black kids, everybody — devoured Harry Potter, but Hogwarts grew from a very particular British fantasy tradition and boarding school tradition, and with a few secondary character exceptions, everyone’s British and white.

I don’t think there’s a single white character in Akata Witch. And not only that, but the American characters — the only Westerners — are singled out for their Americanness; being American is Other, even explicitly in the title. Nigeria, an African country, is portrayed as a place where normal people live out their lives — not crushingly impoverished people, not people in a war zone, but kids and adults who go to school and have jobs and cell phones. Sunny’s parents had jobs in the U.S. and chose to move back to Africa. I don’t even know how to say how rare that is in an American children’s novel.

Stacy Whitman of Tu Publishing talks about “mirrors” and “windows”:

mirrors to see your own experience reflected back, windows to see into another world. Author Zetta Elliott recently added a dimension to that which I like, the idea of “sliding glass doors” to walk in and experience someone else’s world.

Akata Witch is a much-needed mirror for African-American kids and West African kids who like fantasy, and a heck of a rich, entertaining sliding door for everyone else. Highly recommended.

(Also highly recommended is the rest of Stacy’s 3-part piece on diversity in children’s literature, which begins here.)

Also reviewed by: The Happy Nappy Bookseller, Brooklyn Rail, and Waking Brain Cells. Odnani gives some fascinating background about the Igbo magical tradition from which the book draws.

When the king comes for a surprise visit to Evie’s tiny village, she gets the chance of a lifetime: to go to university in the capitol, where she can study to become a healer like her parents were. Her grandfather is devastated to lose her, but he lets her go… provided she is accompanied for protection (ahem) by handsome Aidan, the boy next door. They travel by coach, under strict instructions from Grandfather never to go by sea — but when their coach is attacked by a highwayman and the driver killed, they have no choice but to book passage on a ship. And that’s when Evie’s adventures really begin…

Like the author’s last book, The Amaranth Enchantment, this is full of twists, but it holds together much better. It ain’t deep, but it’s loads of fun. Definitely recommended for your “Yes, I’ve read The Goose Girl… yeah, and the other Bayern books… Ms. Parenthetical, I’ve read everything Shannon Hale’s ever written, what else you got?” kids.

Also reviewed by: The Book Scout

Deposited at boarding school while her parents travel the world, 17-year-old Ellie is grumpy and lonely, but safe. But then New Zealand is rocked by a series of murders in which the victims’ eyes are taken, and the trail is leading closer to Ellie’s school. Her crush, Mark, starts acting strangely and she knows she knows why, but can’t remember. Her only friend, Kevin, falls for a mysterious red-haired woman with an intolerance for the smell of cooked food. And a crazy man grabs her in town and shouts that she needs to protect herself.

I don’t want to say more, because I don’t want to deprive you of the process of figuring out what’s going on as Ellie does. But trust me, it all fits together. And it’s fantastic! I hope it’s not giving too much away to say that it reminds me of a less ponderous, modern New Zealand, YA Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell — a beautiful, eerie fantasy world creeping out from behind a solidly built real world.

I’m trying a new thing. I love giving booktalks (“pitches” encouraging people to read a book), so why not give some on the internets? I’ll embed my videos here, but you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel, MsParenthetical. (My colleagues and I also recorded a bunch of booktalks for our students last year, which you can see on our library YouTube channel.)

Also reviewed by: Pink Me, Book Smugglers (which discusses many of the issues I wanted to get into further but didn’t due to a) spoilers and b) time), and Ripley Patton (more spoilers, more issues).

MINOR SPOILERS, re: magic & fat acceptance

It’s probably not a shocker that Ellie turns out to have powers. One of my favorite things about this book is that she hasn’t a clue how to use them. Other magic-users who’ve had more experience tell her she’s useless, which in most books would be the point where she “somehow knows what to do” and proves them all wrong. Not Ellie — her magic is, realistically, pretty useless for most of the book. But she isn’t a useless person, and that is an important distinction.

…

Ellie describes herself disparagingly as “fat” and “large” repeatedly over the course of the book. She compares herself unfavorably to skinny Iris, and imagines how everyone else who looks at the two of them is appalled at her relative hugeness. (We never get any external confirmation of her size.)

But: the “beautiful” man she’s crushing on falls for her, as she is. She never loses weight. In fact, near the end, there’s a “trapped in a metaphor” moment in which she is squeezing through an ever-narrowing tunnel, cursing her size… and then realizes, “I’m not too big! This is too small!” and smashes herself a bigger space. I cheered. (She does not then shout triumphantly, “You have no power over me… power over me… power over me,” even though I wanted her to.)

My friend Rebecca Rabinowitz pointed me to an essay about this issue in the book at The Rotund, and Karen Healey’s response on her blog.

Nieve started promisingly. I quite liked Nieve herself — she spends a free afternoon starting her own newspaper, to see if she has an aptitude for journalism. She buys a stylish lime green shirt, not because “she overvalued trendy clothes and name-brand runners and all that, but [because] the odd cool item was useful, even necessary. She could hold her head up in school and not be marked for ridicule….” This shows admirable practicality and social awareness for a young heroine.

But then her town starts to fall into a gothtastic pit of spiderwebs and creepy carnivorous plants and gaunt apothecaries with eyeball candy. (Alexander Griggs-Burr’s illustrations are fantastic, definitely the best part of the book.) Her vaguely magical “Old World” Gran assigns her a mysterious sidekick, Lias, and sends her off to save the world.

Unfortunately, it’s unclear from whom the world needs saving. Or why Nieve is the one to do it. Or what Lias and Gran have to do with anything, or what’s going on with all the other characters who pop in at just the right times to move the plot along. Lias has a lot of these answers from the beginning, but of course he can’t share them with Nieve (and us) along the way; that would be too easy. It’s much more fun to read a couple of chapters of Murder, She Wrote-style wrap-up at the end.

And, most frustratingly, the magic has no logic and no rules. Sometimes Nieve “just knows” what she’s supposed to do. Sometimes another character tells her (though it’s not always clear how they know.) Rarely do we see her work anything out for herself, even though she’s clearly no intellectual slouch. She never learns to use her sword; she just happens to be inherently gifted with sword-wielding.

Coming to a library or independent bookstore near you in April.

(Full disclosure: I really wanted to love this, because it was the first review copy sent to me by a publisher specifically in order to get my opinion. I appreciate the vote of confidence, Biblioasis; I wish I had better things to say about the book.)

Finnikin escapes and spends his adolescence traveling with his mentor, doing what they can to alleviate the suffering of the scattered Lumateran refugee camps and find their people a new home. As the book opens, he has been called to a distant monastery to take on a new traveling companion: Evanjalin, a traumatized Lumateran refugee who claims to have seen their kingdom’s lost heir in her prophetic dreams.

I love me some complicated stories (5th season of Lost, what now?), but this is a bit “kitchen sink.” There are too many Important Messages, too many characters with Painful Pasts, and too many Big Reveals. The stuff about the two goddesses and their religious conflict, in particular, seemed tacked-on.

I also have no problem with violence or sex or challenging subjects in YA lit, per se. That sort of book is not for everyone, which is why it’s part of my job to be familiar with what might be difficult about the books in my collection, but they can be powerful for a lot of kids. That said, I do have a problem with gratuity. If it isn’t key to the story or the characters, gloss on over that sex scene or graphic torture. I’m no prude, but despite the themes of growing up and finding oneself, I’d be hard-pressed not to put this in the adult section.

All that aside, I think I would have been more into this when I was younger. I was going to be a martyr to activism; the strong woman tying herself to trees, no doubt about the rightness of her cause. I admired no end characters in books who walk miles with no shoes and torn and bloody feet, as Evanjalin does, sheltered by their single-minded purpose.

Turns out I have no single-minded purpose. Turns out I prefer nesting in a safe city with my friends around me and working at a job that is meaningful but not overly exhausting (er, usually). No one’s going to write any epic biographies about me, and I am a-ok with that. Now that I’m an adult, Evanjalin and Finnikin’s single-mindedness just seems naive. I recognize that they are refugees, that their lives are challenged in ways that mine never has been and hopefully never will be. But I still found it hard to connect with them. I want a spin-off about Lady Abian and her household full of displaced villagers, keeping her community alive with low-key good humor (and randomly having really loud sex with her husband, because for some reason Marchetta felt the need to share these moments with us). She’s much more my speed.

But this seems to be in the Megan Whalen Turner category of “stuff I should love, that everyone else loved, but I couldn’t get into.” So your mileage may definitely vary.

Also reviewed by: Skerricks, Library Lounge Lizard, and Persnickety Snark.

The Prince of Fenway Park, Julianna Baggott

Check this premise, people: the famous Curse on the Red Sox is a real curse, brought on by an angry faerie. Not only does it prevent the Sox from winning the Series, it also traps an odd assortment of Cursed Creatures in tunnels under Fenway Park. Oscar’s deadbeat dad turns out to be one of them, and only Oscar can break the Curse and free his father and the rest of his family.

It’s one of the most original fantasy premises I’ve ever heard, and as a Bostonian I’m contractually obligated to love it at least a little. I wanted to love it a lot — and there were things I did love about it, besides the Boston stuff.

Oscar is mixed-race, white and African-American, and adopted by white parents (ok, one turns out to be half-fae, but it’s not like that’s a box you can check on the census). There aren’t enough books like that to start with, and the way this one uses the fantasy journey to help Oscar find where he belongs is kind of beautiful. The Curse ends up being in part about how shamefully the Sox treated black ballplayers, and the parallels between Oscar and Jackie Robinson were neat. I loved that the Sox weren’t the unmitigated Good Guys — they were a deeply flawed “hero” who had to grow up in order to be worthy of having the Curse broken. It made baseball be about something deeper.

Lots of kids will love this book (though I can’t tell how many will be neither Bostonians nor baseball fans). But I was disappointed in the magic: it’s too easy, too contrived.

The Farwalker’s Quest, Jodi Sensel

In this vaguely post-apocalyptic future, almost no one ever leaves their village, and little old knowledge remains. Thirteen-year-olds Ariel and Zeke are about to choose their vocations, when they find a mysterious message dart in a tree that sends them on a long journey and changes their futures forever.

This is an old-school fantasy adventure that manages not to be (too) derivative, the above summary notwithstanding. If you like the title, you’ll like the book — it’s pretty much as advertised. I couldn’t put it down.

Slight spoiler
I have to tell you, though, that I got a little obsessed with the relationship between Ariel and her protector, Scarl — and I wasn’t alone. A bunch of us judges got vibes. The book claims that they develop a father-daughter relationship, but I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to decide how old Ariel would have to be before their 16-year age gap was no longer icky. I mean, I had a crush on Scarl, so I totally saw where Ariel was coming from. He’s all moody and tortured! (It was very Fire and Hemlock, for the three of you who get that reference.)

11 Birthdays, Wendy Mass

This is Groundhog’s Day for kids — and I love me some Groundhog’s Day, so I found it charming. If you’re looking for a slightly quirky read for nice girls who can’t get enough books about friendship and Learning About Themselves — the girls who loved Savvy — this is a solid choice. But as a potential award winner, I didn’t think it sang.

Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, Grace Lin

If you need a gift book for an elementary school girl, this is a lovely choice. It’s the children’s novel equivalent of a period piece: the set designer and costumer will win Oscars, and it’s easy to ignore the rest.

Fortunately, in this case the rest is also lovely. Lin’s writing is simple in a way that evokes mythology, but it’s meatier than Odd and the Frost Giants. The stories all weave together in a very particular way: I was reminded of Bridge of Birds, which makes me wonder if this brand of story interconnection is a feature of Chinese mythology. (Anyone know?)

I would have been totally bored by it as a kid — there’s not enough excitement, and it would have felt like something adults thought was Good for Me. But I hope not all kids are as narrow-minded as I was, because it really is an excellent book.

Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman

This is an invented myth about a boy who tricks the frost giant who’s taken over Asgard, thereby saving his people from endless winter — it’s Neil Gaiman, doing what he does with the reinvented mythology and whatnot. It’s cute, but slight.

The Serial Garden, Joan Aiken

This is a posthumously collected book of Aiken’s short stories about the Armitage family, to whom something magical happens almost — but not every — Monday. They’re delightful, and so adorably British they created an insatiable desire for tea and crumpets… but they’re all kind of the same. Once you’ve got the hang of the amusingly blase way the Armitages react to a unicorn in their backyard or a witch teaching the neighborhood school, you could pretty much write the rest of the stories yourself.

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