Review of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Audiobook, by J. K. Rowling

Audiobooks, Fantasy, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,

by J. K. Rowling
Performed by Jim Dale

Listening Library, 2007.  21 hours, 40 minutes.  12 cassettes.

Review written February 22, 2008.

Starred Review.

Sonderbooks Stand-out 2009:  #3, Audiobooks

I read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows last summer, and finally got to the top of the request list to listen to the cassettes.  After finishing the book a second time, I’m again hit by sadness that the story is over, that there isn’t any more.

I’m reviewing the audiobook separately because I simply have to gush about Jim Dale.  He is incredible!  His vocal range is amazing.  He uses different voices for the enormous cast of characters and makes the books come alive.

We’ve read all seven books aloud as a family, but I still get something new out of hearing Jim Dale read them.  Of course, his British accent adds to the enjoyment!  But more than that, his amazing expressiveness adds a whole new dimension to the books.  If you love Harry Potter, here’s a way to enjoy the series afresh.  If you haven’t read the books and have been meaning to, treat yourself to listening to them.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/hp_deathly_hallows.html

Review of The Arrival, by Shaun Tan

Graphic Novel, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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The Arrival

by Shaun Tan

Starred Review.
Arthur Levine Books, New York, 2006.

The Arrival is an amazingly effective story of the immigrant experience—told in a graphic novel without any text—or at least without any text that we can understand.

The illustrations, beautifully drawn and wonderfully detailed, show us a man leaving his family behind to go on a long journey.  The pictures seem to be telling a historical story of a man traveling to America.

But then he arrives, and we see fantastic animals such as don’t exist on earth (at least that I know about!).  The letters of the text on signs are incomprehensible.  The clothing is different and strange.  The buildings are wild, unfamiliar shapes.

The man must try to find shelter, learn how to use the machines in his dwelling, find food, (including figuring out what it looks like and how to eat it) and find work.  He meets other immigrants and hears their stories.  And above all, he wants to bring his wife and daughter there to join him.

All this is shown to us without any words we can recognize.  By using strange, alien-looking objects and animals, Shaun Tan communicates the strangeness immigrants experience far more effectively than he could ever have done with words.

This book is shelved in the Young Adult section, but can span all ages from upper elementary to adults.  The powerful, wonderfully crafted images will stick in the reader’s mind for a long time to come.

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Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/arrival.html

Review of Rapunzel’s Revenge, by Shannon and Dean Hale

Adventure, Fantasy, Graphic Novel, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Rapunzel’s Revenge

by Shannon and Dean Hale

Illustrated by Nathan Hale

Bloomsbury, 2008.  144 pages.

Starred Review.

Sonderbooks Stand-out 2009: #2, Teen Graphic Novels

http://www.shannonhale.com/

http://www.spacestationnathan.com/

http://www.bloomsburyusa.com/

I am a huge Shannon Hale fan.  So though I normally would not have rushed to buy a graphic novel, when I heard that she had written one with her husband (The artist, though having the same last name, is not related.), I simply had to buy it.

This wasn’t up there in the best-thing-I’ve-ever-read territory like her novels, but all the same, this book is completely delightful.  Though, come to think of it, it’s the best graphic novel I’ve ever read.  (Don’t tell my son!)

Rapunzel’s Revenge tells the tale of Rapunzel, set in the old West.  Rapunzel is no wimpy princess, waiting for a prince to set her free.  When she learns at twelve years old what “Mother Gothel” has done to her real mother, and how she terrorizes the countryside, Rapunzel confronts her.  She’s promptly placed in a tower made from a giant tree that Mother Gothel made with her growth magic.  The same magic begins to affect Rapunzel’s hair.

There are some fun things in the illustrations.  I love the three books Rapunzel has in the tower:  Girls Who Get Saved and the Princes Who Save Them, How to Make a Twig Bonnet, and There’s Always Bird Watching.

With nothing to do in the tower, she practices her lasso skills by using her ridiculously long hair, braided into rope.

Finally, after she turns sixteen, her hair is long enough for her to use it to escape her prison.  It’s after her escape that she sees a traveling adventurer who heard about the beautiful maiden in a tower.  She points him to the tower and tells him the maiden is slightly deaf, so he should be sure to yell as loud as he can.

On the way back to Gothel’s villa to rescue her mother, Rapunzel becomes a vigilante, helping people with her amazing lasso of hair.  She falls in with a rogue named Jack who’s been having some trouble with giants.  Rapunzel convinces Jack to help her rescue her mother and bring justice to the countryside, which has been sucked dry by Gothel’s magic.

Here’s a girl who doesn’t need saving!  This imaginative adventure has a heroine you can cheer for.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/rapunzels_revenge.html

Review of Paper Towns, by John Green

Contemporary, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Paper Towns

by John Green

Dutton Books, 2008.  305 pages.

Starred review.

http://www.sparksflyup.com/

http://www.nerdfighters.com/

www.penguin.com/youngreaders

Wow.  Paper Towns isn’t quite like any other teen novel I’ve read.  At first glance, it’s a typical teen novel about parties and girlfriends and pranks and prom and graduation.  But it goes so much deeper, dealing with profound questions like whether we can ever truly know another person.

The opening of the book is awesome:

The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle.  Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or become the dictator of a small nation in the Pacific Islands, or contract terminal ear cancer, or spontaneously combust.  But if you consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us.  I could have seen it rain frogs.  I could have stepped foot on Mars.  I could have been eaten by a whale.  I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea.  But my miracle was different.  My miracle was this:  out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman.

Quentin and Margo were friends as kids, but he hasn’t seen much of her since they started high school.  She moves in a much more brilliant circle.  Then, one night late in their senior year, Margo knocked again on Q’s window.  She convinced him to drive her on a wild night of sweet revenge.  The next day, she disappears.

Paper Towns deals with Quentin’s quest to find Margo.  As he looks for clues, he comes to terms with the fact that no one knew the real Margo.  Each of her friends saw her as someone slightly different.  Can we ever truly know another person?

Quentin must also face some of his own fears and figure out who he is himself.  Why did Margo choose him on her night of revenge, and why did she leave clues for him to find?  Did she expect him to find her?

I admit that, as a fan of John and Hank Green’s Brotherhood 2.0 video blog (see http://www.nerdfighters.com/ ), I had a tendency to “hear” Quentin’s voice as John Green talking.  However, that worked fine and made the character that much more believable and likeable.  It’s refreshing to read a teen novel from a guy’s perspective.

The author pulls off all this profundity with a light touch.  Quentin has friends who are nerdy and quirky, and he doesn’t go on his quest alone.  Some of the teen antics will make parents cringe, but other than that it makes for fun, light-hearted reading.

I read the latest posts on John Green’s blog at http://www.sparksflyup.com/, where he talks about some of the amazingly profound questions teens have asked him.  I think that’s his secret — He has nothing but respect for the thinking of teens.  He doesn’t water down the philosophical questions behind the story here.  So although it is indeed a teen novel, the issues raised are issues about being human, and will give people of all ages something to ponder.

I did enjoy An Abundance of Katherines, but I do think that John Green has grown as an author and I find Paper Towns an outstandingly well-crafted novel.  (What I’m trying to say is that I liked this new one even better!)

As a librarian, it will be interesting to see who I can get to read this book.  (I’ve already talked my teenage son into reading it, but he is already a fan of http://www.nerdfighters.com/, so he didn’t take any convincing.)  I find myself wishing it didn’t have a picture of Margo on the cover, since I think there are many teenage boys who would thoroughly enjoy this book, and I will have to talk them into trying a book with a picture of a girl on the cover.  (There are two covers for this book, one with a bright, happy Margo, and one more dingy, sad and dark.)  At any rate, for now the book is on hold, so it’s getting some buzz, and I will not have copies on the shelf to recommend to anyone. 

Definitely worth reading, for readers of any age who are willing to have some fun and explore questions about how they see the world.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/paper_towns.html

Review of Let It Snow

Christmas, Contemporary, Romance, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Let It Snow

Three Holiday Romances

by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle

Speak (Penguin), 2008.  352 pages.

Starred Review

http://www.sparksflyup.com/

http://www.maureenjohnsonbooks.com/

http://www.laurenmyracle.com/

www.penguin.com/teens

Okay, I’m in the mood for holiday reading, and this book of three intertwined holiday romances was completely delightful.  I began reading during a dentist appointment, and found when I got home, my recovery demanded further reading.

The three stories are all teen romances, delightfully told.  John Green’s story, told from the guy’s perspective, is in the middle, and makes a nice subtle change from the other two, but I loved all three.

Maureen Johnson tells the  first story, where Jubilee Donegal is on a train to visit her grandparents in Florida instead of at her boyfriend’s big family Christmas Eve Smorgasbord.  Her parents were arrested in a riot over collectible Flobie Santa Village buildings, and Jubilee got sent to Florida.  Unfortunately, she doesn’t get far before the train is stopped by snow.  She’s in a car with a group of cheerleaders off to a cheerleading competition and a cute guy obsessed with trying to call his girlfriend (and failing).  What can she do except go out through the snow and try to get to the Waffle House she sees across the highway?

What follows is a delightful story of adventure and eye-opening revelations and, yes, romance.

John Green’s story involves a guy and two friends trying to get through the snow to the Waffle House, where their friend, the store manager, is telling a hysterical tale about a group of cheerleaders needing “help” working on cheers.  He needs them to bring a Twister game, but if they take too long, someone else’s friends might beat them to it.  Once again, things don’t happen as they expect.

In Lauren Myracle’s story, we see the ex-girlfriend of the guy on the train, despairing because he didn’t show up and he didn’t even call.  Meanwhile, her friends need her to do a little something for them — and they don’t want to hear that there’s been another “crisis.”

The stories dovetail beautifully.  They are all funny and sweet and wonderfully entertaining.  Definitely recommended holiday reading!

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/let_it_snow.html

Review of The Light-Bearer’s Daughter, by O. R. Melling

Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

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The Light-Bearer’s Daughter

The Chronicles of Faerie

by O. R. Melling

Amulet Books, New York, 2007.  348 pages.

http://www.ormelling.com/

http://www.amuletbooks.com/

Twelve-year-old Dana barely remembers her mother, who disappeared when Dana was three years old.  Now her father wants to leave Ireland for a job in his native Canada.  If they leave Ireland, how will her mother ever find them?

When her father takes Dana to visit some friends, protesting the felling of a stretch of forest, Dana gets a message from faerie.  Before long, she’s recruited for a quest, a quest to save faerie from the Destroyer who’s entered the land.  If Dana accomplishes the quest, she can make a wish, and she knows what she wishes for more than anything else — to find her mother again.

The quest is dark and difficult and full of surprises.  Dana encounters several surprising helpers along the way, and the end is not what she expected.

This is a lyrical tale, set in modern-day Ireland (even including places I have visited!), peeling back layers of magic and mystery.  The author weaves in Gaelic songs and old Irish history, including St. Kevin in Glendalough, giving the reader a sense of place.  Reading this book is like taking a magical trip to Ireland.

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Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/lightbearers_daughter.html

Review of Beastly by Alex Flinn

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

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Beastly

by Alex Flinn

HarperTeen, New York, 2007.  304 pages.

Starred review.

http://www.alexflinn.com/

http://www.harperteen.com/

Here’s a wonderful retelling of Beauty and the Beast, set in modern-day New York City, told from the beast’s perspective.

I just saw the Twilight movie, and now I’m going to recommend Beastly to people who like the movie but don’t want to wait for 900 people on the request list for Twilight.  Although there are no vampires, Beastly has the same flavor of supernatural romance, told with beautiful writing.

Kyle Kingsbury knows he is the sure winner for ninth-grade prince of the spring dance court.  No one can compete with his looks and his dad’s cash.  When a creepy goth girl challenges the whole idea of voting based on looks, he reacts.

“She pissed me off, so I jumped on her.  ‘If someone’s so smart, they’d figure out how to get better-looking.  You could lose weight, get plastic surgery, even get your face scraped and your teeth bleached.’  I emphasized the you in the sentence, so she’d know I meant her and not just some general sort of you.  ‘My dad’s a network news guy.  He says people shouldn’t have to look at ugly people.'”

Later, Kyle thinks of a way to get her back for her disturbing words.  A way to utterly humiliate her at the spring dance.

The author convinces us that he completely deserves his curse:  to become a beast until he finds “someone willing to look beyond your hideousness and see some good in you, something to love.  If you will love her in return and if she will kiss you to prove it, the spell will be lifted, and you will be your handsome self again.  If not, you’ll stay a beast forever.”

When Kyle’s Dad is convinced that doctors can’t cure him, he rents Kyle a house in another part of the city with a housekeeper and a tutor, with thick shutters against the outside.  Kyle slowly shows the beginnings of transformation as he learns to grow roses and loves them.  So then when a junkie crashes into his greenhouse….

I love the way Alex Flinn worked in all the elements of the traditional tale.  I also loved the believable way she showed us Kyle changing, transforming.  And of course there’s the wonderful blooming of true love.

Between all that drama, there are hilarious interludes of transcripts from a chat room, the Unexpected Changes chat group, hosted by Mr. Anderson.  There’s a mermaid called SilentMaid, a former prince called Froggie, and someone called Grizzlyguy who’s met these two girls, Rose Red and Snow White (not *that* Snow White).

All this adds up to a truly delightful book that I hope will become wildly popular with teens.  And any adults who will admit to enjoying Twilight, let me urge you to give Beastly a try.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/beastly.html

Review of Anahita’s Woven Riddle, by Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Historical, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Anahita’s Woven Riddle

by Meghan Nuttall Sayres

Amulet Books (Harry N. Abrams), New York, 2006.  352 pages.

http://www.meghannuttallsayres.com/

http://www.hnabooks.com/

Set in 1880s Iran, Anahita’s Woven Riddle tells the story of a girl of a nomadic tribe who loves the land, loves their annual migration, and loves to put the colors of native plants, along with her own dreams, into her weaving.

When the local khan seeks to marry Anahita, she is not happy.  He has already buried three wives, and he does not seem to be a kind man.  She wants to marry someone who loves riddles as she does, so she requests that her father offer a contest.  She will weave a riddle into her wedding carpet, and she will marry the man who can solve her riddle.

This book gets off to a slow start, and I wasn’t impressed at first with the writing, jumping into the perspectives of various people.  However, by the end I was quite absorbed in learning Anahita’s fate.  I ended up liking that the author presented the viewpoints of more than one suitor whom Anahita could be happy with.

I did learn lots about the history of Iran and the nomadic peoples of Persia.  The author conveyed Anahita’s love for her land and her tribe.  She learns from the dyemaster how to make dyes from plants she finds along the path of their migration, and scorns the new chemical dyes available in shops in the city.

This book has a meditative quality, including poetry by the Persian poet Rumi.  The story does draw you in and leaves you feeling you’ve caught a glimpse of the heart of old Iran.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/anahitas_woven_riddle.html

Review of Janes in Love, by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Contemporary, Graphic Novel, Romance, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Janes in Love

by Cecil Castellucci and Jim Rugg

Minx (DC Comics), 2008.  152 pages.

Starred Review.

The Janes are at it again.  In this sequel to The Plain Janes, Jane’s group of friends (all named Jane), try to give new life to P.L.A.I.N. — People Loving Art in Neighborhoods — with new “Art Attacks.”  However, their funds are running out, the authorities are still against them, and Jane’s Mom reacts badly to news of another terrorist attack.

Meanwhile, Valentine’s Day is approaching, and all hearts are turning to thoughts of love, making life that much more complicated.

I liked this graphic novel even better than the first.  It’s a fun story of a gutsy character, who still believes in her message: Art saves.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/janes_in_love.html

Review of Wicked Lovely, by Melissa Marr

Fantasy, Teen Fiction Review 0

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Wicked Lovely

by Melissa Marr

HarperTeen, 2007.  328 pages.

http://www.harperteen.com/

http://www.melissa-marr.com/

Aislynn has always been able to see faeries, much to her horror and disgust.  Faeries walk among us, and they are not very nice.  Grams has warned her, again and again, not to attract their attention, not to let the faeries know she can see them.  That’s one reason Aislynn likes to visit Seth — he lives in an old train car, made of steel and safe from the disturbing presence of faeries.

Then the Summer King notices Aislynn, and chooses Aislynn.  Her fate seems to be sealed.  Keenan, the Summer King, is locked in an ages-long battle with his mother, the Winter Queen.  Once he chooses Aislynn, she must either become one of the empty-headed Summer Girls or dare to take up the staff and risk the Winter Queen’s chill.

Aislynn has seen the world of faerie and wants no part of it.  There must be some way out.  And what about Seth?  Keenan has never met a mortal so good at resisting his charms.

Wicked Lovely has some dark and gritty parts, exploring the dark side of faerie.  But the core of the story — a girl grappling with love and destiny — is intriguing and powerfully written.

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Find this book on the main site at:

www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/wicked_lovely.html