Dear L. K. Madigan,

Flash Burnout – L. K. Madigan – 336 pages

“Fifteen-year-old Blake has a girlfriend and a friend who’s a girl.  One of them loves him; the other one needs him.  When he snapped a picture of a street person for his photography homework, Blake never dreamed that the woman in the photo was his friend Marissa’s long-lost meth addicted mom.  Blake’s participation in the ensuing drama opens up a world of trouble, both for him and for Marissa.  He spends the next few months trying to reconcile the conflicting roles of Boyfriend and Friend.  His experiences range from the comic (surviving his dad’s birth control talk) to the tragic (a harrowing after-hours visit to the morgue).  In a tangle of life and death, love and loyalty, Blake will emerge with a more sharply defined snapshot of himself.”  –from HoughtonMifflinBooks.com

Flash Burnout sticks out in my mind as a book I can’t quite decide about.  I picked it up because something about it caught my eye, but then put off reading it for a while because the blurb on the back wasn’t capturing me as much as other things in my pile.  I think I felt the same push and pull while I was reading, too.  There were definitely great moments of humor, and a plotline that took a lot of really exciting turns, but sometimes the prose seemed to drag for me a little.  Still, my overall impression of it was a good one–you captured the dynamic of teens and friends and more-than-friends really well.  Sometimes I felt like the narrator was less a real teenage boy and more a cobbling-together of what a teenage boy is expected to be, but that’s forgivable, and I think what Flash Burnout really needed was just a little bit of sharpening to make a really thrilling plot into a more memorable reading experience.  Still, I read it through, and enjoyed it, so three stars for this one!

Love,

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Dear Carolyn Turgeon,

Godmother: The Secret Cinderella Story – Carolyn Turgeon – 288 pages

“Lil is an old woman who spends her days shelving rare books in a tiny Manhattan bookstore and lonely nights at home in her apartment. But Lil has an intriguing secret. Tucked and bound behind her back are white feathery wings–the only key to who she once was: the fairy godmother responsible for getting Cinderella to the ball to unite with her Prince Charming. … But then one day she meets Veronica–a young, fair-skinned, flame-haired East Village beauty with a love of all things vintage and a penchant for falling in love with the wrong men–and suddenly it becomes clear to Lil that she’s been given a chance at redemption. If she can find a soul mate for Veronica, she may right her wrong and return to the fairy world she so deeply longs for….”  -Random House website

I’ve been lazy with the writing of plot summaries lately, but when the publisher’s website does it well, who am I to resist?  At any rate, Godmother was a mixed bag for me.  When I read the description I quoted above, it sounds like something I’d want to read–and it was along the right lines.  You had some elements, like the fairies’ underwater home, that were unique and surprising.  Your prose was generally lovely, too, and you did a great job with crafting some mystery around Lil and revealing only little bits of back story at a time.  The flow and the organization was good, and I was with you.  Then I hit the “twist” at the end, and the whole thing was soured for me.  You pulled an Alice in Wonderland, and I felt tricked, like I’d been denied what could have been a genuinely interesting fantasy novel or (with some changes) a fascinating novel about the human psyche.  It turned out to be neither, and I was pretty disappointed.

Even so, I don’t like to end a review on a bad note.  I rather enjoyed myself up until the end, and I can see why people who aren’t me might appreciate the twist.  Three stars in my opinion, but as always, that’s just my opinion.

Love,

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Books this year: 95

Pages this year: 18,442

Dear Zilpha Keatley Snyder,

The Bronze Pen – Zilpha Keatley Snyder – 208 pages

Audrey wants to be a writer, but she keeps her dream (and her stories) a secret from her ill father and overworked mother.  When Audrey starts writing stories with the new pen given to her by a mysterious old woman, strange things start to happen–talking dogs, dragons under the bed, even a kidnapping by pirates!  Audrey must learn to use the pen “wisely and to good purpose,” as the old woman instructed in order to put things right again.

I’ve been reading and re-reading your books with fervent adoration since I was a kid combing the library shelves; my copies of Season of Ponies, The Witches of Worm and The Egypt Game are particularly worn and well-loved.  Your work always seemed to wrap me up and suck me in, surrounding me in this blanket of mystery and enchantment…that sounds kind of silly, but that’s how I always felt, like I might turn a corner and something magic would happen.  So when I saw The Bronze Pen on the shelf at the store, I just had to bring it home, and read it with high hopes.  I have to say, though, that this one didn’t do it for me the way some of your others always have.

I think the problem is that too much remains a mystery.  Who is the mysterious old woman/voice in the cave?  Where does the pen come from?  How does it relate to Audrey’s grandmother (I think it was her grandmother), who told stories about a white duck?  I presume it’s the same white duck that leads Audrey to the cave to get the pen, but it was just a little too mysterious–I wanted more back story.  I hate to say it, but I kind of felt like you phoned this one in.  It wasn’t bad, certainly, but it wasn’t glittering and totally absorbing and REAL the way your best fantasies are.  I didn’t believe it, and that made it a little dull.  Still, I think it’s a good read for the middle grade fantasy-loving crowd–it’s got enough adventure, danger, and well-crafted prose to keep the reader reading.  Three stars for this one, mostly because it fades in comparison to your other work.  It’s okay, you’re still one of my personal goddesses. 

Love,

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Books this year: 91

Pages this year: 17,461

Dear Linda Perlstein,

Not Much Just Chillin’: The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers – Linda Perlstein

After spending a year observing, interviewing, and recording in a Maryland middle school, Perlstein presents a close-up picture of the middle school experience, including the perspectives of teachers, parents, and the kids themselves.

I had a lot of issues with Not Much Just Chillin‘.  At first I was really enjoying the kids, their attitudes and their speech and all the things that make kids that age entertaining to me, but then I started to notice your voice coming into it much more than I would have liked.  You often took a knowing and patronizing tone when describing the kids and their lives, making subtle judgements about their fashions, or belittling their emotions.  I took the book out of the library and have since had to return it, so I can’t quote specific examples here, but I felt throughout the text that you were coming at this whole experience from an entirely adult point of view–the stance of an adult who isn’t really trying to understand the social and emotional workings of twelve-year-olds, instead just reporting without the proper empathy or context as though spying for the grown-ups in some sort of battle.  The sensationalist sort of feel about the book, the “hidden lives” and the all-secrets-revealed attitude didn’t sit well with me, especially with all the reviews quoted on the cover about how it’s “an important book” and “information every parent and educator should have.”

I think it’s problematic, too, that you made a great deal of blanket statements about middle schoolers, and present your book as a guide to all middle schoolers, when you only observed one middle school.  No one school can represent an average, and no one school can be assumed to be like all the others.  Sure, you had lots of back matter and references, but I wish the book had been presented more as a look at one particular school, and less as a look at all adolescents.

I also was concerned by the lack of any information on homosexuality in middle schoolers.  Certainly some people don’t know yet, at that age, but also certainly some do; you frequently mentioned the kids’ reactions to being called gay or supposed gay, and how that was one of the worst names they could be called, but included no statistics of how many kids that age actually identify as gay or lesbian, nor made any comments addressing whether the middle school you observed had any homosexual students, or how the casual and cruel use of “gay” in bullying and name-calling might affect students in the closet.  It seems irresponsible to report anti-gay bullying and then pass it off as something they do whether or not the target child is actually gay without any further explanation or investigation, especially when you spend so much time investigating and supposing and explaining heterosexual dating, crushes and sex.

Overall, I wish that you’d sided with the kids, trying to make their world comprehendable to the clueless adults, rather than the adults-always-know-better-and-now-we-know-your-secrets tone you took.  Three stars, and only that high by virtue of the kids themselves and the insights I got from what little of their real perspectives you presented.

Respectfully,

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Dear Susan Beth Pfeffer,

The Dead and the Gone – Susan Beth Pfeffer

The sequel to Life As We Knew It, this volume follows three siblings left to fend for themselves in New York City after an asteroid knocks the moon closer to the Earth, causing floods, volcanoes, and worldwide crisis.  With only each other and the priests and nuns of their local schools and church to rely on, Alex, Briana and Julie must somehow find a way to survive in the new, harsher world order.

I was looking forward to reading The Dead and the Gone with great anticipation, since I loved Life As We Knew It so much.  Unfortunately, the sequel didn’t live up to my hopes for it.  Your prose was as lovely as ever, stark and heartbreaking, but this time around the story didn’t hold any surprises for me; since this tale takes place during the same span of time as the first novel and in the same geographical area, I already knew to expect the flooding, the ash, the sudden cold, and all the other hardships.  It just didn’t have the same emotional pull as the first book did, and because of that I found it harder to feel for the characters.  I wish that, instead of just switching from a white family in the suburbs of eastern PA to a Latino family in Manhattan, you’d taken me to the Pacific coast, or the midwest, or the south.  The tension you created in the first novel, with people leaving in the hope of finding a better place to live in another part of the country and then never being heard from again, was so thrilling and captivating–I wish you’d shown me whether their hopes were founded, or what happened in places where volcanoes sprouted, or something.  Instead, this sequel was basically a repeat of the first novel, without the same drama of the unknown.  I know you’re working on a third book, and I’ve resisted reading your blog about it to get spoilers–I’m certainly going to read it when it comes out, in the hopes that it will go somewhere I’m interested in following.  As for The Dead and the Gone, though, I was so disappointed in comparison that I think it has to be a three.

Love,

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Dear L. J. Smith,

The Vampire Diaries 1-5:  The Awakening, The Struggle, The Fury, Dark Reunion and The Return:  Nightfall – L.J. Smith

Elena is the undisputed Queen of the School, and can always get any guy she wants–except the mysterious and handsome new boy, Stefan Salvatore.  She vows to get him even if it kills them both, but she doesn’t know how very likely that is until Stefan’s troublemaking brother Damon shows up, and life-or-death-or-undeath mayhem ensues.  With everything from the familiar vampire lore to Druidic magic and Japanese fox demons, this as-yet-unfinished series follows the exploits of Elena, Stefan, their friends, and all the baddies that haunt the little town of Fell’s Church.

The Vampire Diaries started out with the same old first day of school setting, which I was mentally bemoaning as another Twilight copy until I realized it was published more than ten years prior to the Cullen Craze.  Which then led me to wonder if Stephanie Meyer read your first Vampire Diaries book, then went to sleep and had a dream that inspired her to write a book…..  You know the story, I’m sure.  At any rate, as I started reading, I found the prose slightly less lacking than Stephanie’s, but still in need of a firmer editorial hand.  Still, the twists and turns of the story were enough to make me continue, partially because I was traveling and had brought no other books with me.  I will admit that I was intrigued enough to soldier through, and somehow found myself at the end of five books that just kept getting more and more…complicated, to put it delicately.  I was with you for a while, with Stefan’s tragic past and Damon’s very very hidden secret good heart, and Elena and Stefan’s everlasting love.  It was when you started going a little bit ’round the bend that I began to lose faith.  You just kept throwing things at me–human death, transition to vampirism, vampire death, returning from death as a glowing, flying, unbearably pure angel-spirit-child-thing, magic invisible wings of redemption and healing, and Japanese kitsune that stuck out like sore thumbs in an established world of European vampire and magic lore.

I mean, okay.  I love Buffy, and Joss threw many of those things at me, too.  But the difference was that I cared about Buffy, and all the characters surrounding her.  I never particularly cared about anyone in the Vampire Diaries–Elena’s the sort of stuck-up bitchy popular girl I always hated in school, and all her friends revolve around her like she’s the sun in the sky.  Stefan is a bit like brooding Angel at his most irritating, and Damon is evil but lacks Spike’s rakish charm, let alone his depth.  So I hope it’s believable when I say that it’s not the fact that all those things happened that turned me off, but the way they happened, and the people they happened to.  I get that you’re trying to create a world in where magic and beasties and such exist, and you’re going gung-ho for the drama, and I even get that you’re trying to branch out into the mythology of other cultures by bringing in the kitsune in the most recent book.  Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work.  The execution just isn’t there to support the huge leaps of fancy that really require the reader to be sticking right with you the whole time.  I think if more of the word count was spent making the characters into fully-realized, somewhat likeable people, it would be easier to swallow the crazy plot turns.

Let me say, though, that I think this sort of thing has its place in the world of books.  There are plenty of other books I read that I could objectively review just as harshly, but that I adore with unwarranted and enduring fervor.  The Vampire Diaries didn’t do it for me the way Twilight did, or even the way Mercedes Lackey or Caroline Cooney or even Joanna Campbell did when I was younger.  But that’s just me–it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there for whom The Vampire Diaries are just the right kind of junk food, and I wouldn’t begrudge them that pleasure.  Still, from my perspective, you get a 3.

Respectfully,

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Dear Delphine Chedru,

Spot It!  Find the Hidden Creatures – Delphine Chedru

This unique seek-and-find picturebook looks like just a collection of colorful, retro patterns at first glance–but look hard enough and you’ll find a host of hiding creatures!

Spot It! is the kind of book that I want to display on my coffee table–it’s just so much fun to look at, bright and vivid, with full bleeds on the patterned pages and lots of white space on the facing text pages.  Also, the animals are all surprisingly well hidden!  It’s a very fun book to page through.  I did have two issues with it, though.  First, the binding was kind of weird–it’s somehow a little softer and less solid than a hardcover, but it’s clearly not a paperback either.  The final effect looks more like a sturdy composition notebook than an actual hardback picturebook.  I could overlook that, though, because in a strange way it adds to the retro feel of the book.  My other issue, though, is with the final spread.  All the creatures that were hidden on the previous pages are hidden somewhere in this final picture, except one–and the text asks the reader to figure out which one, without providing the answer.  Now, I could go back and forth through every page and figure it out, and I’m sure any other reader could, too–but it severely disrupted my enjoyment of the book as a whole.  The flow was cut abruptly short, asking me to go back and forth checking for each animal instead of pulling things together in a satisfying, tied-up ending.  It would’ve been a good solid four without that jolt at the end, but I think I’ve got to drop it down to a three.  It’s still definitely on my list of books to buy, though, just for the sake of the lovely colors!

Love,

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Dear Tinling Choong,

I think it’s going to be hard to describe how I felt about FireWife.  It was certainly fascinating–the kind of thing that I’d expect to read for a college class, maybe Women’s Studies, or Mythology.  I think in that context, with some group discussion about it, I’d be able to interpret it better.  As it is, I found it to be intriguing, but a little too disjointed and stream-of-consciousness to really understand or find much meaning in.  I wish I knew more about the mythological elements that came into play–that might help bring some order to the chaos for me.  Three stars, but three interested stars.

Love,

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Dear Kathy Tucker and Grace Lin,

The Seven Chinese Sisters is a retelling of a rhythmic tale I already know and adored as a child in the form of The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Huchet Bishop, illustrated by Kurt Wiese.  It was later retold in The Seven Chinese Brothers by Margaret Mahy, illustrated by Mou-sien Tseng and Jean Tseng, and probably has made other appearances in the American children’s book industry as well.  Your version, though, left a little bit to be desired.  It was a feminine version than the feminist version of the story I’d hoped for, but okay, that’s not necessarily the end of the world.  Tne ending rankled me a little, though.  After the sisters discover that the baby-stealing dragon is actually just sad and skinny and hungry, they go home to have a meal of delicious noodle soup themselves, and never go back to give some to the poor starving dragon.  They say that they will, tomorrow, but that’s not quite enough in a story that comes from such a patterned source.  The Chinese brother stories are full of repetition and follow-through, and it seems like a disservice to end the Chinese sisters’ story before they’ve solved both their problem (the dragon stealing Seventh Sister) and the dragon’s problem.  On a bright note, the art is very sweet and whimsical, simple in a childlike way that appeals to me and gives the story a very friendly feel in spite of the baby-stealing.  I’m so attached to this story’s forebears, though, that I have to give it three stars in comparison for the disappointing end.

Love,

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Dear Inda Schaenen,

I loved the Saddle Club books when I was a kid, caught in the throes of the horse phase, and I picked up Saddle Wise #1:  Rainy Day Rescue in the hopes of recapturing some of that horsey joy.  You didn’t do a bad job, really–I think I just forgot how mediocre these kinds of series books often are.  You had all the elements of a horse-and-girl story here, which made it pleasantly familiar but also a little bit dull, and the prose could have been a bit more…sparkling, maybe.  My feeling about it is that it’s a sort of knobby-kneed little cousin of Marguerite Henry’s body of work, trying to keep on its feet but occasionally stumbling into a pile of gangliness.  Okay, enough with the horse metaphors–three stars (and not the kind on Rainy Day’s forehead).

Love,

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