Review of Linda Buckley-Archer's "Gideon" Trilogy



This is the story of a boy named Peter Schock who is sent back in time to 18^th-century England along with a girl named Kate Dyer. 

Sounds like a science fiction book, right? Right. And yet also, in a way, wrong. 

Because The Time Travelers series is just as much about the history as it is about the science of time travel. Peter and Kate are forced to acclimate to live in the 18^th century among friends (usually historical characters, but also the Gideon Seymour who lends his name to the trilogy’s title) and enemies (mostly the fictional Lord Luxon and his murderous henchman the Tar Man). The more you know about your British 1700’s history, the more you’ll enjoy these books. 

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Fairy Tale YA

Retelling fairy tales is in vogue now.  We have TV series like Grimm and Once Upon a Time, movies like Jack the Giant Killer or Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters and so many Snow Whites it’s a wonder the Evil Queen had enough poisoned apples for all of ‘em.  And where television and movies are trendy, the books are sure to follow…or lead.  

Review of Scott Westerfeld's "Leviathan" Trilogy

Let’s cut to the chase.  I don’t like Scott Westerfeld’s Leviathan trilogy. Despite knowing that TONS of people LOVE this series and consider it the QUINTESSENTIAL read for STEAMPUNKERS…I didn’t like it. Don’t reach for your tomatoes (and perhaps sharper objects) to throw at me quite yet. It is rare that I actually read a book I dislike—usually it’s apathy at worst—so please just hear me out. 

Don’t get me wrong.  There are specific things I liked about the series:

The Steampunk. To give this multifaceted subculture a crude definition, is basically Victorian Sci-Fi. Think awesomely anachronistic technology made up of clockwork and powered by steam, and you’re getting close to understanding what it is. The reason I like steampunk is because I love Victorian fiction, including H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, and Steampunk is a hearkening back to that kind of literature.  

The German characters. I like Alek (the main boy protagonist, son of the recently-assassinated Franz Ferdinand) and his bodyguard/mentor, Count Volger. 

The alternate history. This partly goes along with the Steampunk element, but I always like historical novels that also ask, “What if?” I like contemplating the various directions events could have gone in if a mere element was out of place or altered. 

 In Behemoth I like the setting of the Ottoman Empire and the character Lilit.

 Nikola.  Tesla.

Reviewing Kate Milford's "The Boneshaker"

Before I start this review, it might be helpful to define a genre that not every reader, particularly a casual one, is familiar with: Magic Realism. It’s not realistic literature. It’s not fantasy or science fiction. It’s…both. Kind of.  

If you look it up in a dictionary (or search the term online), you’re going to get a lot of Salvador Dali paintings and some paragraphs about Latin literature such as the works of Gabriel Marcia Garcia or Isabel Allende. 

YA Fiction Trends

Trends in publishing are not confined to YA books. Diary of a Wimpy Kid comes out and suddenly the shelves are deluged with copycat books with doodly illustrations. But in no other section are trends more evident than the teen shelf.

 
You know you’re in the YA section (even if it’s not labeled as such), whether it be library or bookstore or just perusing* a friend’s shelves, when the spine colors are predominantly black.

Before, when Harry Potter was the mainstay of YA, hand-drawn covers like the ones from A Series of Unfortunate Events was the main cover art. As of this writing, thanks to Twilight and The Hunger Games, black is the new black.

Cornelia Funke's "Inkheart": A Review

“Her curiosity was too much for her. She felt almost as if she could hear the books whispering on the other side of the half-open door. They were promising her a thousand unknown stories, a thousand doors into worlds she had never seen before.”

~ Cornelia Funke, Inkheart

As part of this week’s theme of YA fiction, I’m going to start by reviewing some “stand-alone” novels. This is because there are few YA novels I’ve read that are truly stand-alone; either they are part of a series, or they are so similar to another novel that the two beg to be reviewed and compared together.

Now you probably are wondering, “Hey, I’ve read the title of this post. And I know that Inkheart is the first in a series.”  

This is true. Inkheart (Tintenherz in its original German) is the first of a trilogy, followed by Inkspell and Inkdeath (Tintenblut and Tintentod) that chronicles the adventures of a young girl, Meggie, and her various relatives and friends. 

The reason I’m going to break protocol and NOT review the second two books is that when I was reading them I had the distinct feeling that Funke had planned for Inkheart to be stand-alone, but after she’d finished she decided to add on to the story.  I have several reasons to suspect this, but first let me give a short synopsis of the first book so we’re both on the same page…er…so to speak.

Back to the Classics Reading Challenge 2013

After weeks of procrastination, I have finished the Back to the Classics Reading Challenge hosted by Sarah Reads Too Much! This is my second completed reading challenge after the European Reading Challenge that I did back in May. According to the instructions for the wrap-up post, I'm supposed to note that I finished one "Entry" for completing all the required category reads as well as two "Entries" for completing all the optional categories. 

Total Entries (unless I counted wrong, which would not be unheard of because math is evil and I hate it): 3

The Many Mutations of YA

After a week off for good behavior, I’m back to my Summer Reading Program Recommendations and Reviews.  

Up next: YA. To those not in the know, YA stands for “Young Adult.” Libraries alternately label such books as “Youth” or “Teen Lit,” and if it seems like these books are hard to peg at distinct age-level, that’s because this section of literature is transitional by nature.  Adolescence is a transitional period in a person’s life, and it affects each individual in a different way. Therefore each individual reader will be mature enough for YA books—and outgrow them—at varying time periods. 

Astrid Lindgren's "Pippi Longstocking": A Review

Pippilotta Delicatesa Windowshade Mackrelmint Efraimsdaughter Longstocking is a bright, brave, strong, creative, and independent young girl. 

She also is a child anarchist against adult discipline. 

I read these books as a child, and even as a child I did not so much live vicariously through Pippi’s rebellion against the parents, teachers, and other authorities she encountered, as I gasped along with her straight-man friends Tommy and Annika at her improprieties and hidden loneliness.

Because, even though she lives in a children’s book, Pippi is like a real person.  

She has good qualities—including her superhuman strength and never-ending cheer—and since she is the titular character we can’t help but root for her against burglars and other villains like “pluttifikation.”  

But then there is the other side of Pippi, which makes her human and fallible as if she weren’t a literary hero. She is ignorant—oh, she’s clever enough, but she lacks education. She can barely read (!!!!), which means if she were a real person she wouldn’t be able to read her own stories. She also is rude.  For every gift she gives on her birthday there’s an occasion for her being thoughtless about others, or disrespectful of elders. And then there’s the whole situation with her living alone in Villa Villekulla with a horse and a monkey while her father abandons her for a cannibal kingdom….

"A Little Princess" and "The Secret Garden": A Double-Feature Review

“I’ve often thought,” said Sara, in her reflecting voice, “that I should like to be a princess; I wonder what it feels like.  I believe I will begin pretending I am one.”

~ A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett, Chapter V. Becky

If it seems that the children’s novels I’ve been recommending have a similar tone—that of overactive imaginations, spunky orphan girls, etc.—I assure you that this pattern has only just now occurred to me as I’ve been making them. The truth is these are the classic children’s novels I loved as a girl, and if I loved them—before all my English Literature courses in college or reading all the documentations on how to classify and analyze and critique literature, back when I enjoyed it with a naïve enthusiasm that children tend to have for stories—then I’m sure other people will love them.

Maybe these books have been recommended to death. Maybe what I say about them is nothing new under the sun. Oh well. Nowadays for every plug for A Little Princess there’s five reviews of Diary of a Wimpy Kid. It’s all well and good for new books to be brought to readers’ attention. But it’s also good to remind them of the “golden oldies,” as it were. And that’s what I’m going to do today.

Cover Fail: Anne of Green Gables

Source:

http://abcnews.go.com/images/Entertainment/ht_anne_of_green_gables_ll_130207_vblog.jpg

This is the story of blond, attractive, self-assured, and plaid-bedecked Anne Shirley as she graduates college and moves into a trendy coed dorm after conning her way into the lives of two loser farmers and forming a cheerleader clique with Diana and regularly pushing resident nerd Gilbert Blythe into his locker.

At least that’s what I get from this cover.

"Anne of Green Gables": A Review

“They were on the crest of a hill. The sun had set some time since, but the landscape was still clear in the mellow afterlight. To the west a dark church spire rose up against a marigold sky. Below was a little valley and beyond a long, gently rising slope with snug farmsteads scattered along it. From one to another the child’s eyes darted, eager and wistful. At last they lingered on one away to the left, far back from the road, dimly white with blossoming trees in the twilight of the surrounding woods. Over it, in the stainless southwest sky, a great crystal-white star was shining like a lamp of guidance and promise.”

~ Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery, Chapter 2: Matthew Cuthbert is Surprised

Anne of Green Gables is the first in a series of nearly a dozen novels and short story collections which first made Lucy Maud Montgomery famous and later drove her crazy. Like Arthur Conan Doyle with his creation of Sherlock Holmes, the Anne Shirley character was so beloved by her audience that she soon took on a life of her own, and Montgomery was stuck writing stories for her ad nauseam. It’s pretty clear from Montgomery’s tone in the later books that the creator was sick of her creation, and though she didn’t throw Anne Shirley off the Reichenbach falls, one can’t help suspecting Montgomery was sorely tempted.