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Tag: for young people

Mairelon the Magician, Patricia C. Wrede

Y’all, I’m applying for graduate school.  It is stressful as hell.  I’m telling you because the more people I tell, the more shaming it would be for me not to go through with it.  And yes!  I am using shame as a motivator!  If it can beat the crap out of me every time I do something wrong, then by God I can make it work for me to do something constructive AND AWESOME.  Since launching on this project of telling everyone, I have outlined my personal statement, asked for two recommendations, started an online application, and found the hard…

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Odd and the Frost Giants, Neil Gaiman

Imagine my surprise when I discovered this at the bookshop!  The American bookshop because the book is here in America now!  Who knew?  It’s thrilling!  Odd and the Frost Giants is about a boy called Odd who has bad luck.  His father has drowned, and his stepfather doesn’t much care for him, and an accident with a tree has left him with serious and lasting injuries to one of his legs.  He runs away from home, into the forest, where he meets a bear, a fox, and an eagle, who actually are Thor, Loki, and Odin, cast out of Asgard…

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Several books at once

Ack, I am so behind on reviews.  I am working on a project that requires a lot of attention (fortunately I can work on it while still watching classic Doctor Who), which is the excuse I’m using for my negligence.  Feel free to be distracted from this by a picture of my beautiful hat: Gerald Morris’s The Squire’s Tale and The Quest of the Fair Unknown Essentially, Gerald Morris writes very sweet retellings of King Arthur legends from various sources, making fun of impractical chivalry rules and having Gawain be the coolest knight of all the knights.  Instead of Lancelot,…

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The Ask and the Answer, Patrick Ness

Y’all.  For serious.  Patrick Ness. The Ask and the Answer has caused me to lose the power to form sentences.  I am not even lying.  I was sat there in the Bongs & Noodles right after I finished reading the book (which isn’t officially out yet – I love it when the bookshop doesn’t care), and someone asked if the seat next to me was taken.  I believe my exact words were “Nnng blfff chair sit.  I mean, no,” and then I wanted to tell them all about The Ask and the Answer and how intense and terrifying it was. …

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Saffy’s Angel and Indigo’s Star, Hilary McKay

Oh I just love Hilary McKay.  She has written these Casson books, which are among the most endearing books I have ever read.  I organize my bookshelves (more or less) by how much I couldn’t do without the books, with the books on the right being the absolutely most essential ones, and then getting less and less essential moving to the left.  And the Casson books, despite being a recent discovery, are on the far right of my children’s books section, along with the likes of The Ordinary Princess and Peter Pan and Indian Captive, which I read when I…

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The Robe of Skulls, Vivian French

Mm, I hated the troll sidekick.  I hated him.  The evil sorceress lady Lamorna (only she’s not that evil – good for her to get the robe at the end despite her wicked ways!) is totally justified in smacking his head off.  I would smack his stupid head off too.  He spoiled every scene he was in.  The Robe of Skulls is all about Lady Lamorna trying to raise enough money to make a robe all out of skulls.  With spiders.  She’s thrilled about the whole idea, but she doesn’t have enough money, and so concocts a scheme to raise…

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The Thirteenth Child, Patricia C. Wrede

Verdict: Not racist! (Phew.) I read somewhere that The Thirteenth Child was racist, and it stressed me out because Patricia C. Wrede was one of my favorite authors when I was coming up, and I didn’t want her to be racist.  Especially because she’s the other author besides Jane Yolen that I wrote to in my youth, and she wrote me back a really nice email telling me to keep on reading and pay close attention to the things my favorite authors were doing, and that’s how I would get to be a better writer myself (which is what I…

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling

Oh, the seventh and final Harry Potter book.  This post will probably contain spoilers for a number of previous books, and likely spoilers for this one as well.  Sorry.  Can’t help it.  Don’t know how to talk about Harry Potter without spoilers.  Harry and Ron and Hermione have left school now because they are questing for Horcruxes!  They spend all sorts of time running around the countryside trying to find the damn things, and getting into all sorts of scrapes, and at last, you will be pleased to hear, Voldemort gets defeated and everyone is happy.  Except the ten thousand…

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The Patron Saint of Butterflies, Cecilia Galante

Cecilia Galante is a lovely name.  The Patron Saint of Butterflies is quite good too.  It’s all about two girls in a religious commune, Honey and Agnes.  As children they were the best ever of friends, always racing and playing and having a jolly time together, but now that they are a bit older, Honey has begun to rebel against their religious leader, while Agnes is getting ever more scrupulous about her religious observances.  When Agnes’s grandmother comes to visit and discovers that the commune people (communists?) are being abused by their religious leader, she becomes determined to take Honey,…

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An open letter to Patrick Ness, author of The Knife of Never Letting Go

Wow, Patrick Ness, color me super impressed.  Way to create a distinctive, consistent, memorable voice for your protagonist.  That isn’t easy.  I have not read a book where I enjoyed the narrator’s voice so much since, mm, The Book Thief, and before that The Ground Beneath Her Feet.  Which are two of my all-time favorite books. The Knife of Never Letting Go is based on a fantastic premise, that the aliens in this settled world have given the settlers the disease of Noise, which killed all the women and left the men able to hear each other’s thoughts; and then…

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