Review of Once a Princess, by Sherwood Smith

Fantasy, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 2

Once a Princess

Sasharia en Garde! Book One

by Sherwood Smith

Samhain Publishing, 2009. 278 pages.
Starred Review
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #7 Fantasy Teen Fiction

I read this wonderful swashbuckling tale on the flight to Los Angeles for Christmas, and was very upset with myself that I hadn’t brought along Book Two. (Though that’s the first book I’ve read in the New Year.)

The book begins in a January Los Angeles heat wave, but doesn’t stay there long. Sasha was born in another world, and now people from that world are looking for her.

Long ago, her father, a prince of Khanerenth, had come to our world and romanced Sasha’s mother. He married her and brought her back to his world, but when King Canardan took over the throne, things got dangerous for their family. Sasha and her mother got sent back to our world for their own protection, and now Sasha is an adult, still not knowing if her father is alive or dead.

When a young man disguised as a lawyer tricks her and transports her back to Khanerenth, they run right into a group of King Canardan’s guards. Fortunately, a mysterious pirate helps them fight their way out, and Sasha herself has been trained all her life for fighting.

As they continue, everyone has their own agenda, and Sasha is the only one with the spell that can release her father — if he’s still alive. Meanwhile, her mother, Princess Ataniel in Khanerenth, comes after Sasha but gets entangled with the king.

The evil war commander knows she is there and wants to find her to kill her father. Who can Sasha trust? The mages who forced her through the Worldgate? The handsome pirate who won’t even reveal his real name? And what about the useless prince, more interested in clothes and women than running a kingdom?

This tale is full of action and adventure, intrigue and romance. The story really isn’t complete with the first book, though, and you will definitely want to read the satisfying conclusion, Twice a Prince, as soon as possible.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/once_a_princess.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 Aunt Dimity’s Christmas, by Nancy Atherton

Christmas, Fiction Review, Mystery 0

Aunt Dimity’s Christmas

by Nancy Atherton

Viking, 1999, 214 pages.

I read one more Christmas mystery for the holidays, and found it charming and uplifting.

Lori Willis is getting ready to celebrate a lavish Christmas now that she has inherited a cottage in England. Aunt Dimity, who left her the cottage, never actually left, and still communicates with Lori by writing in a journal, and helps her solve mysteries.

Their Christmas mystery hits when a tramp collapses in the snowy lane outside their house. He’s alive, but in a coma in the hospital. Who is he, and why was he going to their house? Perhaps he knew Aunt Dimity?

When Lori visits the stranger in the hospital, she’s haunted by his face. Then she hears more and more stories of good things he has done. But some other things were very eccentric? Is he perhaps a mental patient? Or an angel in disguise?

Between these investigations, her husband going to a funeral in Boston, and her father-in-law playing Joseph in the Christmas pageant, Lori’s Christmas turns out nothing like she planned, but truly memorable still.

A pleasant story with interesting characters that will put you in the mood for Christmas.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/aunt_dimitys_christmas.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 The Lion and the Mouse, by Jerry Pinkney

Animal Characters, Award Winners, Folk Tales, Picture Book Review, Stand-outs, Starred Review 2

The Lion and the Mouse

by Jerry Pinkney

Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers, New York, 2009. 36 pages.
Starred Review
2010 Caldecott Medal Winner
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #6 Picture Books

This stunning picture book is my pick for the 2010 Caldecott Medal. The amazingly detailed paintings tell the story of the well-known fable without words, the only text being animal sounds as part of the pictures.

Without words, I was surprised at what a success this book was at Storytime. The big, beautiful pictures captured the children’s attention, and there was lots for them to talk about on each page. The expressions on the faces of the characters show emotion beautifully. There’s lots of variety in the format, from close-ups to wide angle shots. It would take many readings before you had noticed all the detail in the backgrounds.

I got to hear Jerry Pinkney talk about writing this book at the National Book Festival. He clearly loves animals, and that comes across in this magnificent book.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Picture_Books/lion_and_the_mouse.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.

Happy New Year!

General 0

It’s New Year’s Day, and time for me to post Sonderbooks Stand-outs 2010, my list of my favorite books that I read in 2009.

However, I just came back from a quick trip to California for Christmas. On that trip I didn’t get any reviews written, but I got six more books read, bringing my total of books that I’ve read and want to review somewhere in the forties.

The longest part of the process of posting a review isn’t writing the review, but posting the webpage complete with updated links. So, my plan for the next week or two will be to see how fast I can write reviews on this blog. When I have gotten all caught up, then I’ll post the list of Stand-outs and make the pages for all of those reviews.

And first, I’ll upgrade my blogs to WordPress 2.9.

So, we’ll see if it works! I definitely want to post my Stand-outs before the Newbery winners are announced, because I don’t want to be influenced by that. So that gives me two weeks. Let’s see if I can do it!

Review of Lips Touch: Three Times, by Laini Taylor

Fantasy, Short Stories, Stand-outs, Starred Review, Teen Fiction Review 0

lips_touchLips Touch

Three Times

by Laini Taylor

with illustrations by Jim Di Bartolo

Arthur A. Levine Books (Scholastic), 2009. 265 pages.
National Book Award Finalist, 2009.
Starred Review
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #8 Fantasy Teen Fiction

Laini Taylor is an amazing writer. Her imagination is extraordinary, as she here takes off from different mythologies to create three amazing worlds.

Lips Touch: Three Times is a collection of three stories, all of which involve a kiss in some way. All also involve something fantastic and haunting. Before each story is a sequence of pictures by Jim Di Bartolo showing something that happened before the story began.

The first story, “Goblin Fruit,” is about wanting. The beginning gives you a clue how entrancing these stories are:

“There is a certain kind of girl the goblins crave. You could walk across a high school campus and point them out: not her, not her, her. The pert, lovely ones with butterfly tattoos in secret places, sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? No, not them. The girls watching the lovely ones sitting on their boyfriends’ laps? Yes.

“Them.

“The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls.

“Like Kizzy.”

The second story, “Spicy Little Curses Such as These,” takes us into the depths of Hell, where an Englishwoman barters for lives. She’s allowed to save all the children in a village if she will curse a newborn little girl. The girl will have the most beautiful voice ever to slip from human lips, but anyone who hears it will immediately fall down dead.

Anamique gets along, not challenging the curse, until she falls in love. The consequences of her love and her first kiss are surprising, perhaps not what the demon expected.

The third story, “Hatchling,” also draws you in with the first paragraph:

“Six days before Esme’s fourteenth birthday, her left eye turned from brown to blue. It happened in the night. She went to sleep with brown eyes, and when she woke at dawn to the howling of wolves, her left eye was blue. She had just slipped out of bed when she noticed it. She was headed to the window to look for the wolves — wolves in London, of all impossible things! But she didn’t make it to the window. Her eye flashed at her in the mirror, pale as the wink of a ghost, and she forgot all about the wolves and just stared at herself.”

This story develops an intricate mythology, telling of the soulless Druj, who can take the shapes of animals or humans, but always have pale blue eyes. They like to inhabit humans, and Esme’s mother has a history with them, a history about which Esme is going to learn much more.

In this book, you’ll be drawn into three worlds, left thinking about them long after.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Teens/lips_touch.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 La’s Orchestra Saves the World, by Alexander McCall Smith

Fiction Review, Historical 0

las_orchestraLa’s Orchestra Saves the World

by Alexander McCall Smith

Pantheon Books, New York, 2008. 294 pages.

Alexander McCall Smith is good at writing about ordinary people living radiant lives. La’s Orchestra Saves the World is a stand-alone book, not part of one of his other series. It tells the story of La (short for Lavender), an ordinary woman who moved to the country at the start of World War II.

La contributes to the war effort in a small, ordinary way by growing a garden and looking after a farmer’s hens. She meets interesting people, including a Pole who has lost sight in one eye and can’t fight any longer. And she starts an orchestra.

This is a quiet, pleasant book, a little bittersweet. It tells about ordinary people living in extraordinary times and trying to make a difference in their own small ways.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/las_orchestra.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 Empire of Ivory, by Naomi Novik

Adventure, Alternate History, Audiobooks, Fantasy, Fiction Review, Starred Review 0

empire_of_ivoryEmpire of Ivory

by Naomi Novik

Read by Simon Vance

Random House Audio, 2007. 11 hours, 7 minutes on 10 compact discs.
Starred Review

Ah, the fourth book about Temeraire, the celestial dragon who fights with his captain William Lawrence in England’s Aerial Corps against Napoleon’s forces!

You definitely need to read these books in order. By this time, I am wholly caught up in the saga. Although Book Three, Black Powder War did not end with a cliffhanger, Empire of Ivory begins in the thick of things as if it did. It turns out that the expedition that ended the previous book was not as simple a solution as we thought it would be, and this book begins in the middle of a struggle to carry it out.

When Will Lawrence does get safely to England, he learns that the dragons of England are sick. However, it turns out that Temeraire may be able to find a cure in Africa. Along the way, we see the repercussions of the slave trade in a world where the natives of the African interior have dragons of their own. There’s all kinds of danger and ingenuity and narrow escapes.

I’ve been listening to these books on my commute to work, thankful that I moved further away! Empire of Ivory does end on a cliffhanger, so I checked out the next book the very same day I finished it, and am now eagerly looking forward to my next day’s commute. I have also gotten hooked on Simon Vance’s reading style, complete with accents, which is just as well. I’m sure I’d stay up all night reading the next book if I was enjoying the print version. Listening slows me down in a thoroughly enjoyable way.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/empire_of_ivory.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 A Christmas Promise, by Anne Perry

Christmas, Fiction Review, Historical, Mystery 0

christmas_promiseA Christmas Promise

by Anne Perry

Ballantine Books, New York, 2009. 193 pages.

There’s nothing like a cozy Christmas murder mystery to put me in the mood for the holiday!

Seriously, I’ve come to enjoy Anne Perry’s Christmas offerings. They are short and quick to read. They have just a hint of sweetness, but no overt sentimentality, and enough tension and mystery to provide a puzzle and a sense of relief when the danger is past.

Two poor girls in Victorian England are the focus of A Christmas Promise. Thirteen-year-old Gracie Phipps comes across little eight-year-old Minnie Maude, looking for Charlie, her Uncle Alf’s donkey. Minnie Maude insists that her uncle was murdered, and that Charlie must be lost and frightened because he didn’t come home.

Gracie’s compassion for the little girl quickly gets her involved. But what can two girls do if Uncle Alf was murdered?

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Fiction/christmas_promise.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 Where the Mountain Meets the Moon, by Grace Lin

Children's Fiction Review, Fairy Tale Variant, Fantasy, Readalouds, Stand-outs, Starred Review 0

where_the_mountain_meets_the_moonWhere the Mountain Meets the Moon

by Grace Lin

Little, Brown and Company Books for Young Readers, New York, 2009. 282 pages.
Starred Review
2010 Newbery Honor Book
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2010: #5 Children’s Fantasy and Science Fiction

“Far away from here, following the Jade River, there was once a black mountain that cut into the sky like a jagged piece of rough metal. The villagers called it Fruitless Mountain because nothing grew on it and birds and animals did not rest there.”

Minli lives in this village with her Ma and Ba. They are poor, like the others in the village, but Minli is different.

“What kept Minli from becoming dull and brown like the rest of the village were the stories her father told her every night at dinner. She glowed with such wonder and excitement that even Ma would smile, though she would shake her head at the same time. Ba seemed to drop his gray and work weariness — his black eyes sparkled like raindrops in the sun when he began a story.”

However, spurred by stories, and a magical goldfish, Minli sets off on a quest to ask the Old Man of the Moon how to change their fortune.

This book is a wonderful quest tale, with stories woven throughout, all having the feel of Chinese classic tales. The book design is wonderful, with a small picture for each chapter, full color illustrations periodically, and a change in font whenever a separate story is told.

The stories Minli hears all tie together, helping her on her quest. She meets friends along the way, including a dragon who can’t fly, and must outwit some monkeys and get past an evil tiger. The story itself is simple and satisfying, but also intriguing.

The book reminded me very much of The Wizard of Oz, and I would love to read it to children who are just old enough to listen to a book with chapters. Like The Wizard of Oz, the quest leads our heroine back to those who love her, and everybody ends up happy, having learned their lessons well. Minli does face dangers, but none too horribly frightening.

As much as this book would be suitable for young children, I found it delightful reading myself. I liked the way Minli’s adventures tied in with the tales that were inserted. I’ve always loved fairy tales, and this book offered many original tales, all tied together in the quest of a delightful little girl with plenty of pluck.

Buy from Amazon.com

Find this review on Sonderbooks at: www.sonderbooks.com/Childrens_Fiction/where_the_mountain_meets_the_moon.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.

Teaser Tuesday

Teaser Tuesdays 0

teasertuesdays31It’s Teaser Tuesday!

Last week, I posted five teasers from books I was planning to read soon. In that time, I have only finished two of them, and in the meantime a new Alexander McCall Smith book came to the library, so that immediately went to the top of the pile.

I was happy that last week lots of people posted teasers of their own on my Facebook page. You can use the blog comments, too. Teaser Tuesday is hosted by the blog Should Be Reading, and here’s what you do:

Take a book you’re currently reading, turn to a random page, and post two teaser sentences from that page (no spoilers allowed). Alternatively, you can use the page where your bookmark is lying (which is what I’m doing today). Then tell the title and author of the book.

Here’s my contribution for this week:

La’s childhood was spent in the shadow of Death. He was an uninvited guest at their table, sitting patiently, watching La’s mother, his target, bemused, perhaps, that such courage and determination could keep an illness at bay for so long.

— La’s Orchestra Saves the World, by Alexander McCall Smith