Review of The Cardturner, by Louis Sachar

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Cardturner

by Louis Sachar

Delacorte Press, New York, 2010. 336 pages.
Starred Review

Ever since he was small, Alton’s parents have drilled it into him that his great-uncle Lester is his favorite uncle. Uncle Lester is rich, very rich, and Alton’s parents want to be remembered should anything ever happen to him, God forbid. He’s only actually met Uncle Lester one time, when Alton was six, at his uncle’s sixty-fifth birthday party. When Alton’s a junior in high school, his uncle takes a turn for the worse, and his parents start thinking what they could do with his money.

One person they’re worried about is Sophie Castaneda.

“I’d heard about the Castaneda family all my life, ‘the crazy Castanedas,’ but I never quite got my uncle’s relationship to them. It was complicated, to say the least.

“From what I understood, Sophie Castaneda was the daughter of Uncle Lester’s ex-wife’s crazy sister.

“When Uncle Lester was in his twenties, he had been married for less than a year. His wife had a sister who went insane. The sister had a daughter named Sophie King, who later changed her name to Sophie Finnick, and then became Sophie Castaneda when she got married.

“See what I mean?

“According to my mother, all the Castanedas were bonkers. I met Toni Castaneda, Sophie’s daughter, at my uncle’s sixty-fifth birthday. Toni was about six years old, and I remember I was glad to find someone my own age to play with. Toni ran up to me. She covered her ears with her hands, her elbows sticking out, and shouted, ‘Shut up! Leave me alone!’ and then she ran away.

“She didn’t do that just to me. I watched her tell other people to shut up and leave her alone too. I thought she was funny, but when I tried playing that game, I got in trouble for saying shut up.”

On one of Uncle Lester’s turns for the worse, he goes blind. Alton’s Dad figures he’ll have to stop playing cards, but then his mom hears that Uncle Lester is playing cards four days a week with Toni Castaneda. They aren’t sure how he can do that when he’s blind. Then they get some insight into it:

“It was the second-to-last day of school. I didn’t have any summer plans, just a vague notion about getting a job. I had just driven Leslie to her friend Marissa’s house, and when I got home I heard my mother say, ‘Alton would love to spend time with his favorite uncle!'”

Uncle Lester wants Alton to drive him to his bridge club and be his cardturner. He will tell Alton what card to play, and Alton will play it. Toni had the job before, but then, before playing a card, she asked, “Are you sure?” thus revealing to the other players that Uncle Lester had more cards he could play. He fired Toni and wants someone who knows nothing about bridge. Alton qualifies.

It turns out that Uncle Lester — Trapp is what everyone calls him at his bridge club — is a fantastic bridge player. Alton tells him the cards in his hand at the beginning of each game, and Trapp has no trouble remembering them all and all the cards played during the game. Other people ask him for advice after the day’s play, and he can still remember the cards that were dealt.

You might think a book about playing bridge would be boring, but this is anything but. When the plot requires some detail about the game, the author inserts a whale symbol (because of all the whaling details in Moby Dick) and then a summary box, so if you choose you can skip the details and cut to the summary.

Yes, this is a book about playing bridge — Trapp would like one more shot at the national championship — but it’s also about Alton learning about his uncle and his uncle’s surprising life. And then there’s Toni Castaneda, who is Trapp’s protege as a bridge player. She doesn’t seem crazy to Alton. Too bad his best friend seems interested in her.

I especially enjoy the last third of the book. I can’t give away what happens, but it’s perfect, and what follows brings everything together.

I grew up playing Rook, which is like a very simple form of bridge, so I could follow the play pretty well. The book did make me want to learn bridge! Like other Louis Sachar books, this book strongly appealed to the mathematical side of my brain. You can think of the bridge play as a series of puzzles, which were fun to read about. It was all in the context of a very human story, adding up to a great book.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/cardturner.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Author Interview: Clare Dunkle Blog Tour, The House of Dead Maids

Author Interview, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

I’m so excited! Clare B. Dunkle is visiting my blog as part of her Blog Tour in honor of her new book, The House of Dead Maids. And be sure to go all the way down to the end of the post for an awesome Giveaway!

Here’s a link to my review of The House of Dead Maids. And below is our interview. I think you will find that Clare’s answers to my questions will make you eager to read the book!

I’m so pleased to have you visit my blog for my first ever author interview! I think of you as a friend, since we met up a few times when we both lived in Germany, after I posted on your blog how much I loved The Hollow Kingdom. I’ve loved your other books over the years, too, so when I saw an Advanced Reader Copy of The House of Dead Maids at ALA in June, I snapped it up.

I’ll go a little off-topic for my first question. You lived in Germany 7 years and I lived there 10 years. What was your favorite thing about living in Germany?

I think of you as a friend too, Sondy! As I recall, you attended my very first book signing. (I also recall that the bookstore somehow didn’t manage to have any copies of my book on hand—that put quite a damper on the happiness of the occasion.)

What was my favorite thing about living in Germany? Oh, there were so many! But best of all was the ability to travel a short distance and see picturesque and ancient things, like the Porta Nigra, just forty minutes from our doorstep, which the Romans had built eighteen hundred years ago.

(Fun! That’s almost exactly the same answer I would give to that question!)

One thing I love about your books is that they feel so much like historical fiction, it makes the reader believe these events really happened, including the fantastical ones. I don’t normally like ghost stories, but The House of Dead Maids felt so much like reading Jane Eyre, the ghosts just seemed like a natural part of the story. Tell us about the research you did for this book, and to get the voice just right (which you did!).

This manuscript came along at a very rough time in my life—real trouble in my family. I didn’t like to leave home much. I couldn’t even read cheerful books. But I did feel safe spending time with the Brontës because I knew they hadn’t had a perfect family, either, so I turned my attention to Wuthering Heights.

Now, you know how much trouble we had overseas getting our hands on the right research books. Our little base library could get materials only if they were held by another U.S. military base. But by sheerest good chance, I learned that we have a U.S. base in Yorkshire, and from that base I was able to get all kinds of fascinating research books: picture books about the Brontës, collections of Yorkshire folklore, critical readings of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, volumes of Yorkshire history, even books about Yorkshire weather over the last several hundred years. I read them until Brontë and Yorkshire trivia just oozed out my pores. This gave me something to do other than hyperventilate (which is what I did whenever I stopped reading long enough to worry about my family). I was also reading books on pagan rituals at the time, and I reread Frazer’s Golden Bough, whose influence on my manuscript was considerable.

And of course we traveled to Yorkshire and got to visit all the right kinds of Elizabethan mansions and windswept moors. You can see pictures from that trip here on my website.

After I had a pretty good sense of my setting and of the ideas in my characters’ heads, I turned to the problem of narration. I tend to be one of those people who pick up accents without meaning to (and usually end up sounding pretty funny), so to prepare to write the narration, I read Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall over and over to get the vocabulary and style down pat. I didn’t want to end up sounding like a Victorian; I wanted to end up sounding like a Brontë!

I’ve been reading your other blog tour posts, and one said that you began this book in 2005. Why is it being published so much later?

I finished the manuscript halfway through 2006, and it sold then, but I wound up having to buy this manuscript back from the publishing house that held it. I realized that it was misunderstood there and that if it got released, no one would ever hear a whisper about it.

So we got permission to shop it around again, and we took it to Holt, back to my beloved editor with whom I’d worked on the Hollow Kingdom Trilogy, and Holt bought it back for us. But then Holt had to make room for it on their calendar. It meant losing a couple of years.

I also understand that you have written a memoir with your daughter, and I believe you’ve also written library-related nonfiction. How is writing nonfiction different for you than writing fiction? How is your process different?

In fact, I did so much research on Wuthering Heights and on the Brontës that I wrote a ton of nonfiction connected with The House of Dead Maids. I found that I had a lot that I wanted to say about those subjects, and I didn’t want all that hard work to go to waste. You can find my essays about the Brontës on my website at this page. (The last time I printed all the Brontë stuff out, I think it came to about seventy pages, single-spaced.)

Writing this sort of research essay is like writing my library-related articles: it’s easier to do than writing fiction, but I have to marshal my facts first. I try to line up the facts I intend to cover and put the direct quotations I intend to use into the right order in my Word file. Then I try to write the text around those quotations. But in practice, that breaks down. I never seem to have every quotation I want in the right spot, so there’s a lot of breaking off and hunting up citations and quotations—big untidy piles of books with little Post-It flags sticking out of them, marked up printouts scattered around, that sort of thing.

Writing my daughter’s memoir has been different. That’s been more like writing fiction. It’s channeling characters, even if those characters are us. We’re going for emotional effect, of course, not dry facts. But the part of it that isn’t like writing anything I’ve done before, fiction or nonfiction, is the pain. You know that an author has to feel the pain of the characters in order for the reader to feel it too—now imagine writing your worst memories and nightmares down and being sure that you keep writing out all that pain. I won’t be sorry when revisions are over for this one.

Back when I talked to you in Germany, you didn’t read fiction while you were writing fiction. Has that changed? Read any good books lately?

I still tend to read more nonfiction than fiction, and my research tends to dictate my fiction list anyway. But I do read fiction nowadays, although I go on weird kicks. Earlier this year, I read as much Shirley Jackson as I could get my hands on, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and The Sundial have become two of my favorite books. But lately I’ve been reading sea tales.

Don’t tell Amazon this, but I use the Calibre program to produce mobi files out of full-text Google books (those that are in the public domain, that is). Then I can read them easily on my Kindle DX, which I just adore. The last book I read this way was H.G. Wells’ quirky little tale, The Sea Lady, and I also recently read William McFee’s Casuals of the Sea, a rambling story from the 1910’s that more people should know. And of course I’m reading Joseph Conrad. I appreciate him more now than I did when he was assigned in school. I’m fascinated by the contrast he reveals between the simple, straightforward life of a man at sea and the enormous complications of life in a foreign port. It’s obvious that this was the bane of Conrad’s existence when he was a seaman.

Being an ex-librarian, I like free stuff, so I can’t resist mentioning a favorite source of audio recordings: http://www.librivox.org. That’s a volunteer-only site for public domain books on tape. I download them in mp3 format and then play them on my phone or mp3 player while I’m working out. I’m currently listening to the second of the two Treasure Island recordings, the one done by Dr. Adrian Praetzellis of Sonoma University. He’s a splendid narrator! A professional actor couldn’t do better. You can find a complete list of his librivox readings here.

I see that your publicity photo was taken in Venice. Do you have plans to write a book set in Venice?

I loved Venice, and I thought seriously about writing a story set in Italy, but ultimately, I decided against it, at least for the time being. I’ve been fascinated this year by Shirley Jackson and her ability to make a bland, familiar setting feel eerie and unsafe. It’s that juxtaposition of the known and the unknown that leaves readers looking over their shoulders. So I decided against Italy. It’s too exotic. Any creeps readers got from reading about it wouldn’t stay with them when they closed the book.

I’ve never read Wuthering Heights, but when I talked to you before this interview, you said it would be okay to read this book first, since it is a prequel. You also said you hoped your book would win new readers for Wuthering Heights, and I want to tell you that for this reader at least, you completely succeeded! I want to find out how these things play out in Heathcliff’s life!

Fantastic! That’s exactly why I wrote The House of Dead Maids. I hope you enjoy Wuthering Heights. Those first three chapters are so full of dark surprises and so splendidly written that I envy you getting to read them for the first time. Then you can consult my webpages about the book’s mysteries and motifs and see if you agree with what I’ve written there.

Clare, thanks so much for visiting my blog!

It was my pleasure. You were there at my first signing—now I’m here at your first author interview. Here’s to many more of both!

Readers, be sure to catch her next stop at tor.com! And meanwhile, here’s a fantastic giveaway in conjunction with the blog tour!

Special Brontë-themed giveaway!

One Grand Prize winner will receive The House of Dead Maids, a gorgeous Brontë sisters pocket mirror, and the HarperTeen edition of Wuthering Heights! Two lucky runners-up will receive the two books. To enter, send an email to DeadMaidsBook@gmail.com with your name, email address, and shipping address (if you’re under 13, submit a parent’s name and email address). One entry per person and prizes will only be shipped to US or Canadian addresses. Entries must be received by midnight (PDT) on October 31. Winners will be selected in a random drawing on November 1 and notified via email.

Review of House of Dead Maids, by Clare B. Dunkle

Fantasy, Historical, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

House of Dead Maids

by Clare B. Dunkle

Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, 2010. 146 pages.
Starred Review

I’ve never liked ghost stories. Too much imagination, I think. So I wasn’t planning to pick up this particular Advanced Review Copy at ALA Annual Conference — until I saw the author’s name, and then I snatched it up.

I consider Clare Dunkle a friend. We met when we both lived in Germany, after I raved about her first book, The Hollow Kingdom, on my blog right before she was doing a book signing at the local BX. We met up a few times after that, and I got to know her and like her. And her books continue to be fabulous. Here are my reviews of Close Kin, In the Coils of the Snake, By These Ten Bones, and The Sky Inside.

I still put off reading it, since the creepy cover freaked me out. (Though I’m sure it will entice many teen readers who come to the library looking for “scary” books.) But then I learned that Clare was doing a Blog Tour and asked her to include my site. So on October 14, 2010, I’m posting my first Author Interview! Her answers to my questions turned out to be fascinating, so I’m excited about it.

I read the book surrounded by people on a jet with my reading light firmly ON. I was coming back from the Horn Book at Simmons Colloquium in Boston. I had decided against reading it alone in my hotel room in a strange city! That was a good choice, because the book is definitely creepy. But it’s intriguing, and definitely got me hooked.

The House of Dead Maids is a prequel to Wuthering Heights. Now, believe it or not, I’ve never read Wuthering Heights. I had meant to, and even bought a paperback copy. I think I decided not to after all when my German landlady mentioned that she had to read it in her English class, and she thought it was awful. She asked why anyone would want to read such a horrible story. So I put it a little further on the back burner.

Clare assured me that I could read The House of Dead Maids before reading Wuthering Heights, and she’d expressed that she was hoping her book would get more readers for the classic novel. I do intend to finally read Wuthering Heights now and see what I think. I did read Jane Eyre long ago and completely fell in love with it. Reading The House of Dead Maids, Clare Dunkle completely succeeded in creating a voice that reminded me of Jane Eyre. She says she was trying to write like the Brontes, and I think she did. The voice pulled me into that world and that kind of mindset.

As always, Clare’s writing feels like it was actually written at the time — which makes you believe all the more that the supernatural happenings “really” happened. In this case, she wove in superstitions and rituals of the time for a terribly creepy tale.

Tabby Ackroyd is the narrator, an orphan taken to serve at a creepy mansion. She is given charge of a wild young boy who claims to be master of the house. Tabby doesn’t know what happened to the orphan who went there to serve before her. But then she sees ghosts all over the house and grounds. It turns out they were both brought there for a sinister purpose.

I like the way Tabby Ackroyd turns out to be the housekeeper of the Bronte sisters. I found it quite plausible that she told the girls, who loved ghost stories, this tale of a wild boy who wanted to be master. It was left for them to tell what became of him….

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/house_of_dead_maids.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an Advance Reader’s Edition picked up at ALA.

Review of Suspect, by Kristin Wolden Nitz

Contemporary, Mystery, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Suspect

by Kristin Wolden Nitz

Peachtree, Atlanta, 2010. 199 pages.
Starred Review

Okay, I’ll say right up front that I’m biased about this book. Kristin Wolden Nitz is my friend. She’s a fellow member of the Sisters of Royaumont. We met at a children’s writers’ retreat at an abbey outside Paris back in 1999, started an e-mail critique group, and were reunited at another retreat at the same abbey, Abbaye de Royaumont in 2005, with time together in Paris before and after. Kristin is an inspiration to me as a writer. She’s persistent and versatile.

I’ve given Kristin some critiques on some of her books before they were published, but not this one. Getting to pick up a copy of the Uncorrected Proof at ALA Annual Conference was the first I got to read it. I was very impressed and enjoyed it thoroughly.

When her Grandma Kay needs some help for the summer at the family bed-and-breakfast, 17-year-old Jen agrees to help out. Her dad warns her, though, that Grandma Kay has gotten a crazy idea into her head that Jen’s mother is dead.

Jen’s mother left fourteen years ago. She’s written to Jen over the years and sent her presents, but she’s never been back. Now it’s been a few years since Jen heard from her. Still, why would Grandma Kay now think she’s dead? Has she been watching too many murder mysteries?

Grandma Kay does have a thing for mysteries. Every year she hosts a mystery weekend at the bed-and-breakfast for a competitive group of would-be sleuths. This year, Jen has an uncomfortable feeling that Grandma Kay is modeling the mystery after Jen’s mother’s disappearance. And Jen gets to play the role of the victim.

What’s more, if Jen’s mother was killed, who killed her? Was it one of the people Jen has known and loved all her life, one of the people assembled for the murder mystery weekend?

On top of everything else, Jen’s boyfriend just broke up with her, and she’s finding herself feeling strange things when she’s around Mark, her “uncousin” — like family, a friend since childhood, but not actually related to her.

It all adds up to an excellent “cozy” mystery. You’ve got believable romance, an intriguing and well-plotted mystery, and characters you like and enjoy.

There aren’t so many mysteries out there with teenage characters. This one takes a capable teenage girl and casts her in the middle of an intensely personal mystery she’d rather not be part of. Will she be the detective, or the victim?

This book will keep you turning the pages and leave you with a satisfied smile at the end.

Source: An Uncorrected Proof picked up at ALA.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/suspect.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Review of Ascendant, by Diana Peterfreund

Fantasy, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Ascendant

by Diana Peterfreund

HarperTeen, 2010. 392 pages.
Starred Review

Wow. I thought Diana Peterfreund’s first book about killer unicorns, Rampant was outstanding. But its sequel, Ascendant, is simply awesome. I just spent my Saturday reading it, and couldn’t tear myself away.

In the first book, things are fairly straightforward. Astrid Llewelyn learns that her crazy mother was right and unicorns are, in fact, bloodthirsty killers, and their family has magical powers for hunting them down and subduing them. She goes to Rome and trains with other girls they’ve found, virgin descendants of families from the ancient Order of the Lioness. They learn to hunt together and defeat a conspiracy against them. Along the way, she finds Giovanni, an Italian-American spending the summer in Rome, who loves her as she is.

In the second book, we’ve got the repercussions of this magical scenario. First, Giovanni goes back to college in America so she has to deal with a long-distance relationship. Now the world knows about the Reemergence of unicorns, and Astrid’s mother is capitalizing on their interest. The girls of the Order are still trying to kill any unicorns they can find, but their magic is growing. The hunters can read the unicorns’ thoughts, and Astrid doesn’t like killing something whose thoughts she can read — but her powers are superhuman when unicorns are around. And then, what about school? She wanted to be a doctor, but now she’s a high school dropout.

Meanwhile, Astrid’s cousin Philippa is trying to get unicorns worldwide protection as an endangered species. Astrid tries to reconcile those ideas with the work they are doing. After all, unicorns are attracted to hunters, so they need to train more hunters, or all the people around the untrained hunters will be in danger.

Then there’s the matter of the Remedy — the ancient cure that their ancestors knew how to make that would heal any wound and purify any poison. It works like the unicorns themselves heal when wounded, and like the hunters heal from stabbings by unicorn horns. Surely it can’t be bad for scientists to perform tests on any unicorns they can, in order to try to produce the remedy and save thousands? Can it?

That’s a basic idea of the themes and questions of the book — but the working out of them is much more complex. The plotting is very intricate, and a lot of things tie together in ways we don’t expect. The story is wonderfully well-told, and there are no easy answers. I hope with all my heart that Diana Peterfreund is working on a sequel, because the book doesn’t leave Astrid in a very good situation at all. I’m pretty confident there must be a third book coming, because that’s not the only thing that’s left unresolved. Though the story does end at a satisfying place, I want to learn that things get better for several of the hunters — and the unicorns.

Meanwhile, this book makes a terrific read. A story of characters who find out that saving the world isn’t as simple as it used to be.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/ascendant.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on an uncorrected proof I got at ALA Annual Conference and had signed by the author.

Review of White Cat, by Holly Black

Fantasy, Starred Review, Suspense, Teen Fiction Review 0

White Cat

The Curse Workers, Book One

by Holly Black

Margaret K. McElderry Books (Simon & Schuster), New York, 2010. 310 pages.
Starred Review

“I wake up barefoot, standing on cold slate tiles. Looking dizzily down. I suck in a breath of icy air.

“Above me are starts. Below me, the bronze statue of Colonel Wallingford makes me realize I’m seeing the quad from the peak of Smythe Hall, my dorm.

“I have no memory of climbing the stairs up to the roof. I don’t even know how to get where I am, which is a problem since I’m going to have to get down, ideally in a way that doesn’t involve dying.”

If that isn’t a cliff-hanger beginning, it’s certainly a roof-balancing one. Cassel was dreaming of a white cat. So why is there a white cat outside, watching him on the roof? Later in the first chapter, Cassel tells us:

“Don’t be too sympathetic. Here’s the essential truth about me: I killed a girl when I was fourteen. Her name was Lila, she was my best friend, and I loved her. I killed her anyway. There’s a lot of the murder that seems like a blur, but my brothers found me standing over her body with blood on my hands and a weird smile tugging at my mouth. What I remember most is the feeling I had looking down at Lila — the giddy glee of having gotten away with something.”

I had already scanned the first chapter and decided not to turn it back in (because I have too many books checked out), when I met Holly Black at ALA and she talked about her book — and I moved it to the top of my stack of books to read. I was not disappointed. This book was one I had to keep reading once I started.

Cassel’s world is like ours, only certain people are born with the ability to perform curses. You can curse someone by touching their skin with your hands. But cursing is illegal, and everyone in that society wears gloves all the time.

Curses run a wide range. The most common are luck workers, but there are also people who can change memories, or people like Cassel’s mother who can give you whatever emotion she wants you to have. There are even people who can kill with a curse. Most rare of all are people who can transform things into something else.

All the curses have blowback to the person performing them — a strong reaction proportionate to the curse being performed. So if a memory worker changes a lot of memories, he will start forgetting things himself, for example.

However, Cassel is part of a family of curse workers — and also a family deeply involved in the world of organized crime. He’s the only one in his family who does not have the ability to curse anyone, and he’s been trying to lead a normal life at a private school, trying to forget about what he did to Lila, the reigning crime lord’s daughter. (His family covered it up.)

Now, though, with this sleep-walking caper at the beginning of the book, the school isn’t going to let him live in the dorm. He has to move back in with his brothers, which puts him in the thick of things again.

Holly Black has intricately and beautifully spun a world that seems plausible and real, even with those amazing premises. There are plots and counterplots and counter-counterplots, that get tied up cleverly at the end. Along the way, Cassel learns about making friends and trusting them.

I love that this is called “Book One,” because I can’t wait to read more about this fascinating world. This is a skilfully crafted novel that will make you look at gloves in a whole new way.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/white_cat.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner

Fantasy, Romance, Teen Fiction Review 0

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner

An Eclipse Novella

by Stephenie Meyer

Megan Tingley Books (Little, Brown), 2010. 178 pages.

The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner is a spin-off from Eclipse, telling the interesting back story of a minor character. Since it’s a novella it’s short, and made for a fun afternoon read.

It’s been awhile since I read Eclipse, and I haven’t seen the movie, so I didn’t remember who Bree Tanner was until I got to where her story was intersecting with Bella’s. That was fine, but you will want to have at least read Eclipse before you read this book, to be familiar with the world of sparkly vampires.

In Eclipse, Edward’s enemy is building an army of newborn vampires to battle and defeat the Cullens. Bree Tanner is one of that army, who’s used in Eclipse to show how ruthless the Volturi are. In an introduction, Stephenie Meyer says she wishes she had ended that differently now, and the reader will agree with her in that, because this book does give the reader sympathy for Bree, a ruthless bloodthirsty hunter.

I found it kind of amusing that one way their leader controls the newborn vampires is to tell them it’s dangerous to go out in the sunlight, that it would turn them to ash. He tells them all the old tales are true, and they believe him since they are, after all, vampires.

Toward the beginning, Bree meets another vampire who actually seems trustworthy, and they discover the secret. Even though she’s used to everyone looking beautiful, they’re filled with wonder at the sparkliness, just like Bella was in Twilight.

Stephenie Meyer manages to make us care about this bloodthirsty vampire hunter and want her to learn to transcend her savagery. We enjoy the beginnings of her journey to do so, though unfortunately her second life is very short.

An enjoyable quick adventure back in the world of sparkly vampires and undying love, or rather, undead love.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/bree_tanner.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Will Grayson, Will Grayson, by John Green and David Levithan

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Will Grayson, Will Grayson

by John Green and David Levithan

Dutton, 2010. 310 pages.
Starred Review

I confess I probably wouldn’t have read Will Grayson, Will Grayson if I weren’t such a huge John Green fan. I was won over by hearing him speak about his Printz Honor Winning book Abundance of Katherines three years ago at ALA Annual Conference, and then completely hooked when I started watching his and his brother’s daily video blog through 2007. What can I say? He’s my kind of nerd. Nerd Fighters are made of Awesome.

Of course, I also read An Abundance of Katherines, Let It Snow, and my favorite, Paper Towns. So I thoroughly admire John Green as an author. Though the funny thing about reading his books is that I always hear the main character in my head speaking with John Green’s voice, since I’ve heard him so much on the internet.

Anyway, I was four chapters into his latest book (written in alternating chapters with David Levithan), when I went to the 2010 American Library Association Annual Conference in Washington DC. The exhibits had just opened, and I was frantically grabbing free advance copies of books. I looked up, and there was John Green!

I said, “You’re John Green!” and he graciously conceded that he was. I tried to think of clever things to say. Did I tell him I think he’s a brilliant writer? No, I said I follow his blog. Couldn’t think of much to say after that. Anyway, as he was about to go off to the exhibits, I got my wits about me and asked if I could get a picture with him. He said “David can take it!” as his companions were coming to see what was keeping him — and I realized that familiar face I’d seen with John was David Levithan. So, I insisted on a picture with both of them. This was at the very start of ALA, and it made my night!

Here I am with David Levithan and John Green at ALA 2010.

On the last night of ALA, I got another picture with John Green, at the reception after the Printz Awards Ceremony. Kind of fitting, since I’d first seen him in person at the 2007 Printz Awards.

So, as you can imagine, I like the author, and of course I want to like his books. As it began, it seemed a little depressing, so I might have stopped. One of the Will Graysons is clinically depressed. The other one isn’t terribly happy.

It also turns out to be mainly about Tiny Cooper:

“Tiny Cooper is not the world’s gayest person, and he is not the world’s largest person, but I believe he may be the world’s largest person who is really, really gay, and also the world’s gayest person who is really, really large.”

If I weren’t a huge fan of the author, I would probably simply avoid a book where one of the main topics is a high school student’s gayness. But I’m glad I didn’t avoid this one.

The book is about two high school students named Will Grayson. They don’t know each other. They live in different Chicago suburbs. One Will Grayson has been Tiny Cooper’s best friend all his life. But that Will recently lost what other friends he had because:

“After some school-board member got all upset about gays in the locker room, I defended Tiny Cooper’s right to be both gigantic (and, therefore, the best member of our shitty football team’s offensive line) and gay in a letter to the school newspaper that I, stupidly, signed.”

Tiny is writing, directing, and performing a musical about his life. So naturally, there is a character named Gil Wrayson, which Tiny assures Will is a fictional character.

Meanwhile, the other Will Grayson (written by David Levithan), is in love with his internet chat friend named Isaac. He’s gay but won’t admit it to anyone else, he’s depressed, and his only friend at school is a girl who’s even more depressing.

A strange twist of circumstances brings the two Will Graysons to the same porn shop in Chicago late on a Friday night. Both Will Graysons suffer a big disappointment that night, but the other Will Grayson discovers Tiny Cooper, and Tiny Cooper discovers him.

I wouldn’t want my teenage son to take the characters in this book as role models, but I don’t think older teens read books to find role models. The characters’ language and humor are crude (which almost got me to shut the book early), but it’s also very clever. The characters do seem completely real. Tiny Cooper is larger than life, but he’s no cardboard cut-out. And the two Will Graysons have conflicting emotions and confusions that seem completely true to life. Though I wouldn’t want my son to take them for role models, I’d be happy to have him find friends like these. Flawed friends, but ultimately the kind of people you can count on, you can tell the truth to.

And though this book is about some characters being gay and coming to terms with that, more than that, it’s a book about friendship. It’s a book about real love, and a book about truth. It’s a book that shows that people are the same underneath, whether they are gay or not, and that the love of friendship can transcend all that.

As Will Grayson says in a moment of confrontation and revelation:

“You know what’s important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don’t even know why he needs you?”

This book is awesome. Like so many great books do, it helped me put myself in the shoes of someone very different from me, thus looking at my own life and my own world a little differently. I’m glad I read it.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/will_grayson_will_grayson.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Princess of Glass, by Jessica Day George

Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

Princess of Glass

by Jessica Day George

Bloomsbury, New York, 2010. 266 pages.
Starred Review

I’m becoming a bigger and bigger fan of Jessica Day George. Princess of Glass is a follow up to her excellent Princess of the Midnight Ball, but it’s also an incredibly creative twist on the story of Cinderella.

I thought that the Cinderella story has been rewritten so well so many different ways, there was not much more that could be done with it. Though I must admit all the versions I’ve read are among my favorite fairy tale retellings: Ella Enchanted, by Gail Carson Levine, Bella at Midnight, by Diane Stanley, and Just Ella, by Margaret Peterson Haddix.

Jessica Day George does something quite different with the story and wonderfully creative, using the version where Cinderella attends three balls. What if the godmother were really an evil witch bent on entrapping Cinderella for her own evil purposes? What if the prince and all the people at the ball were affected by an enchantment and falling in love with Cinderella despite their true feelings?

Finally, what if a princess who had experience with evil enchantments and how to protect against them was at the court and was falling in love with the prince herself?

The main character of the book is Poppy, one of the younger of the 12 Dancing Princesses featured in Princess of the Midnight Ball. After so many princes suffered fatal accidents trying to break their family’s enchantment, the king tries to build bridges by sending some daughters to foreign courts.

Poppy is a delightfully independent young lady. When she notices strange things going on around Eleanora, a clumsy servant girl from an impoverished family, she determines to get to the bottom of it. I like the way she’s still knitting charms to help, which she learned from her brother-in-law.

The author includes two knitting patterns at the end, one for the poppy-decorated shawl Poppy wears to a ball. My only complaint is that I wish there were a picture. I’m going to have to make one to see what it looks like!

I found it ingenious how Jessica Day George wove in all the motifs of the Cinderella story (except maybe the stepsisters) in a way so completely different than I’d ever thought of them before. Brilliant!

I can’t help but hope that more stories will be forthcoming about some of the other 12 princesses and their adventures in other foreign lands.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/princess_of_glass.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.

Review of Calamity Jack, by Shannon and Dean Hale

Adventure, Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Graphic Novel, Teen Fiction Review 0

Calamity Jack

by Shannon and Dean Hale
illustrated by Nathan Hale

Bloomsbury, New York, 2010. 144 pages.

Here’s a companion graphic novel to Rapunzel’s Revenge, which was also written by Shannon Hale and her husband Dean and illustrated by Nathan Hale, who, interestingly enough, is no relation to the other Hales.

In Rapunzel’s Revenge, the creators took the story of Rapunzel as sort of a framework for a melodrama set in some sort of version of the Wild West, only with magic and a witch-like tyrant and strange creatures. In Rapunzel’s adventures, she met up with a con-artist named Jack who carried around a goose that laid golden eggs.

You don’t really need to read Rapunzel’s Revenge first to enjoy Calamity Jack. In it, Jack is bringing Rapunzel to the big city where he grew up. In Rapunzel’s Revenge, they rescued Rapunzel’s mother from a tyrant terrorizing the whole area. In Calamity Jack their plan is to rescue Jack’s mother from a tyrant terrorizing the whole area.

We also learn about Jack’s background. Not surprisingly, it involves a beanstalk and a giant. Though like Rapunzel’s Revenge, the fairy tale framework is simply a jumping-off point.

The story is wild, over-the-top, not exactly believable, and melodramatic — but a whole lot of fun. This is a graphic novel adventure yarn with a touch of romance and lots of teamwork, as Jack acquires a rival who’s also interested in Rapunzel. She’s still wielding her braids as a lasso, but it also takes Jack’s schemes to defeat the giants and save the town.

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Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/calamity_jack.html

Disclosure: I am an Amazon Affiliate, and will earn a small percentage if you order a book on Amazon after clicking through from my site.

Source: This review is based on a library book from the Fairfax County Public Library.